


reverse engineered

by arbitrarily



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Canon-Typical Violence, Dubious Consent, Identity Porn, M/M, Undercover Missions, Unreliable Narrator, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-08-29 15:38:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16746751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: Stephen wants Murder. Frank can get it for him. He just needs one thing first.





	reverse engineered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blueteak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blueteak/gifts).



> Happy Holidays!
> 
> I cannot even begin to tell you how much fun I had writing this. Your letter and your prompts immediately set my brain on fire, and somehow I wound up writing this total doorstop of a fic, lol. 
> 
> And now, some general housekeeping, plus some general content warnings: This is set some time between _The Secret Place_ and _The Trespasser_ , hence the canon divergence tag. I tagged this as dubious consent due to the nature of the "bad guys made them do it" trope. There also is some on-screen violence involving plot-necessary OCs, as well as a whole lot of probably totally definitely unethical Undercover behavior and lack of protocol here; I am not a cop. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy this even a fraction as much as I enjoyed writing this. I wish you a very happy holiday and a Happy New Year!

 

 

Frank wouldn’t have batted an eyelid; I know undercovers who’ve slept with gangsters, given out beatings and shot up heroin, all in the name of the job. I never said anything, not my business, but I knew well that was bollocks. There’s always another way to what you're after, if you want to find it. They did these things because they wanted to and because the job gave them an excuse.  
_THE LIKENESS_ , TANA FRENCH

 

Not even you belong to you.  
"SPELLS," JENNY HVAL

 

 

 

###  **1.**

_“I’m gonna tell it like I remember it.”_

The nauseating flicker of fluorescent light lent the interview room a dizzying, time warp feel. A message in a bottle, cast out to sea. Left for me to take up and try to read. My pen was out of ink; I dug it into the blank page before me. Memory, more often than not, in Cold Cases was a gas. A wash. A lie by virtue of time bending a tale, the truth arching away from itself and recast through the private prism of the mind. Wish fulfillment. Magical thinking. But I listened. I would listen. 

“Go on then,” I said. “As you remember it.”

 

 

It was early October, then. The drag and monotony of it all, day in, day out—you could get lost in it. A chilly evening was descending wet and cloying, already gone dark, frost most like that night. We’d wake to fogged windows and the promise of future gray misery. Knackered, I headed to the pub. The Passage, a musty out-of-the-way place crowded by stoop-shouldered locals minding their own. It wasn’t the pub near Dublin Castle I frequented, nor my usual out by my gaff. Random. I was operating on a shallow, surface theory that it was a change of scenery, of routine, that it was variety, I needed. You could say I was banking on an easy fix.

So I sat there alone with my pint. Quietly. Not moody nor moping, but too close to either for my like. If pressed, I would tell anyone who asked that I was a happy enough fella. I rolled with the punches, I worked hard, I kept my head down, got the job done. Lately though, all I felt was done in. Months had rolled by after St. Kilda’s and I had waited. I waited for what I knew would be my next shot. Never came. I had started to think I had the picture all wrong; a man wasted time waiting for his open. You had to seek it out. Nothing came without anything given. I should’ve known that much. Still, I waited. Call it intuition. I never much cared for self-doubt.

But the truth was I had started to feel dragged down by my own self. I looked around and saw the other boys in Cold Cases, saw how they had aged right along with the cases that went without solves, that they didn’t go anywhere either. I saw myself slotted right alongside them and I didn’t much care for it. I considered my pint before me, more full than empty. I lifted my eyes. Frowned, considered the warped shape of the man visible through the glass and ale. 

Frank Mackey. Something stuttered within me, my chest clutched both hollow and too tight.

He was looking right at me. His mouth cracked open in the sort of grin I knew for certain was more than enough to reduce stronger men than me to rubble. I sat and I waited for him to approach, because I was certain of that, too. He had come here for me.

He stopped at the bar first, ordered himself a pint of his own. Thick Guinness, he drank from the top before he returned his attention and his sure-footed approach to me.  

“Would’ya take a look at you,” he said and then he sat down.   

 

 

The last time I had seen Mackey was the same night he had threatened to kill me.

“How’s tricks then?” Mackey asked me, now. 

I played into relaxed, even shrugged some. My body wound tight as a spring set to hop. “Fine. My usual.” A pause followed, all but wobbled in the air between us. “And you? How’s the homestead holding up?”

“Haven’t got one, as it were.” He was wry and self-deprecating with it, which only told me this was a warm-up act. “Liv’s gone off yours here yet again.” I said nothing to that. Traced a cold, wet line down the side of my pint. Mackey was grinning and I could near convince myself there was warmth to be found there. Nearly.

_“If you’re right, I’m going to kill you.”_ That was what he had said to me, on the grounds at St. Kilda’s, and until then I hadn’t known the words could come so soft and promising. I remembered still the weight of his hand on the back of my neck, the push of breath against my face before he spoke. How he smiled after, his work here done. 

“And Holly?”

The good cheer front faded fast near all at once and we were back in the dark, the shadowed halls of Holly’s school. He was still smiling at me, but both his eyes and mouth were hard. “Why? Gonna haul her in for questioning? Got a cold one you trying to put her name on?” Ah, so he was still sore there. Good to know. 

I shrugged again. “Not unless needs be.”

“Look at the bollocks on you.” He was back to being fond, or at least the performance of a man who felt fondness for whatever it was I meant to him.  

But he was studying me openly now, so I allowed myself to look at him in exchange. I wanted to say Mackey had gotten old, but I wasn’t entirely sure that was the truth. He looked tired for sure, his face near paper-thin enough for me to tear down, find the clockwork machinery that worked beneath. The gears that turned, drew conclusions, lit his eyes bright and blue. Despite the obvious exhaustion, the grooves worn in along his eyes and his mouth, both eyes and mouth were still tough and glittering. Sharp and cunning and most like not to be denied. Time had not softened old Frank Mackey; like some sort of coveted blood diamond, he had only hardened. 

“Didn’t know you came by here,” he was saying. He was fishing. For what, I didn’t know. I did know I’d be damned if I’d give him even an ounce of what he was seeking. I could be coy, too. I had been waiting, and more than a small part of me wondered if it was for this. 

“I do when I’m thirsty,” I said. 

“Gone alkie on me, have you, young Stephen?”

“Not yet,” I said, joking, but my mouth had tightened.  _Young Stephen_ ; I was thirty-two fucking years old. 

“Gone bored though. I can see that much. Getting lazy?”

“Neither,” I said, tight now for sure. 

An idea had started to crowd in the back of my mind. I didn’t like it. Didn’t know what else to do with it other than say it, out loud. “Did you follow me here?”

Mackey was all teeth, delighted. “I was cold and I was thirsty, sunshine.” Liar. He had sought me out, specifically, and I couldn’t figure why that would be. Waiting him out felt an unendurable task, but I forced myself still. Stuck with it. I drank more from my pint and Mackey did the same.  

“You still want Murder, don’t you?” Mackey finally said. I lifted my eyes to meet his. 

Some men were keen with patience. They would lie in wait, a coiled serpent’s tail, waiting for the best, not the first, chance to strike. And then there was Frank Mackey. I watched him, still watching me. He had that patience, all right. But he didn’t know I was like that too. That I had always known nothing to be lost from waiting for your shot. The only thing to be lost was the failure to take it. I would take mine. I had been waiting. 

“Yeah. ‘course I do.” Casual-like; I could hedge my bets, too. 

“I can get you Murder.” Mackey said it quietly, with great certainty, though more to himself than to me. He pointed his pint in my direction. I frowned; call it reflex. Many moons ago, when I had Frank’s own brother cautioned and in cuffs, there wasn’t a great goddamn Frank could do for me where Murder was concerned. He had got me Vice, and I had only thanked him as he had zeroed in on how best to fuck me over in order to protect his own girl. I had worked on my own merits to rise up to Cold Cases, and I was determined to work the same to my advantage to finally collar Murder for myself. I had been determined. I had thought St. Kilda’s was my step through that door. And for a day, it had been. But at the end of that day, it was back out the Murder squad room and returned to Cold Cases, safe as houses. As if it had never happened. As if it never happened, save for Mackey seated now before me. St. Kilda’s had done a lot of things to and for me, but it had also brought him back into my life. 

“I thought the gaffer wouldn’t piss on you even if you were up in flames.”

“That’s about the square of it.” He punctuated that with the wry downturn of his mouth. I was cataloging everything, under the assumption that was my ticket to keep up. “But I can get you Murder.” He said it again. I was surprised I couldn’t hear the whirring sound as his brain booted up into higher drive. “But I’m gonna need your help with something first.”

And there it was: the drop of the other fucking shoe. I didn’t even want to ask, to dare imagine it could possibly be a favor as blessedly small and simple as helping Mackey move house. He needed a hand with an oversized armoire or some such. My luck, it was a fucking body needed moving. My luck and the smarmy grin twisting up Mackey’s mouth. 

“What’s it then?” Might as well jump. No other special offers to get the boost I needed out of Cold Cases. A man took what he could get, even it was a deal with the bloody devil. 

“What’s that they say? Quid pro quo? You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours? Oldest currency in the fucking world.”

“What sort of backscratching are we talking about?” It couldn’t be anything good, not if Mackey was dragging it out like this. There was that menacing spark in his eyes, bright as the blue. 

“Look at him—he gets it.”

“Mackey, come on.”

“And now he’s barking. He’s hungry.” He chuckled to himself as he drained more of his pint. He leaned forward and I fought the urge to lean away. “I got a case I been running. Undercover. And I got a hunch I wanna play. You come in on this with me, and I get you what yours.”

He made it sound so deceptively easy. I did this impossible thing, and I got _that_ , equally impossible, but mine. 

“You’re recruiting me,” I said. Something wild and unwieldy began to rise up in me. How bad had I wanted this when he first approached me outside Dublin Castle all those years ago? I had been choking for it. 

“For just a small while. A small project.” I didn’t trust that. 

“I never worked Undercover before,” I said. Stalling for time. Trying to keep something, someone, the enemy, at the gates.

“Don’t let popping your cherry frighten you off the fun, kid.” 

“Fuck off.” I ran my finger over the rim of my glass. “How you know I’d be any good for it?”

Mackey leaned back with his arms open, the very opposite of inviting. “I’m a very good teacher. And you strike me as a very quick and eager learner. You work for me. Three months, and then: Murder’s all yours for the taking.”

“Just like that.” Skepticism shone in both my voice and my face. 

“You ever heard of Sullivan Bird?” 

That brought me up short. “The gangster?” I knew more than that, though not by much. I did most certainly know that when dealing with Frank Mackey you never showed all your cards. You kept that hand close to the fucking vest.

But Sullivan Bird. Jaysus, but he was infamous—bloodthirsty and flamboyant in his outsized criminality. Among his lesser sins he was rumored to have a rotating ensemble of rough trade at his beck and call. Worry started to gnaw its way up my gut. 

“One and the same.” Mackey paused, deliberate and performative. The Frank Mackey Art of Persuasion—he had a gift. “How’s about the both of us take him down?”

“What? In three months' time?”

“I don’t know if you’re aware, dense, or in denial, but I really am fucking good.” Another pause that stretched along with his grin as he strung me along. “And it would be a start. It’d be more than I’ve got right now.”

He was giving me more than he thought he was, I was all but sure of it. He needed me. Frank Mackey had played his hands and he was out of options, any option that wasn’t me. No way in hell I had been his first choice. 

The job, he said—equal parts conspiratorial and confident, would involve infiltrating Dolus, a club run by Bird and his men. I worked hard to keep my face plain, unreadable. I must’ve failed because Mackey laughed. “So you’ve heard of that too then?” he said. I said nothing, even if my mouth felt very grim. Everyone had heard of Dolus, all but a fuck club exclusively for men Vice had done nothing to shut down. “Look at young Stephen there. Not a kink to be found in that brain of his, pure as an angel’s pink bared arse.”

I snorted. “That’s me. Missionary with the lights out and both parties asleep by eleven.” That wasn’t true, but Mackey laughed again all the same.

“So, let’s say, hypothetically, I infiltrate Dolus. What then?”

“I don’t spill the details of my plans to random men I meet in bars, Steve-o.” He was loving this.

“Right. Then tell me this at least. Why me.” I said it flat, reflecting back on Mackey.

He snorted. “What? I gotta lick your arse first?”

“Before you bend me over? Yeah, I’d say you do.” The words were out before I could think the better of them. I watched Mackey’s face light up with dark delight. As if I had proven something he had long wondered about me. “Come on. Why.” His features rearranged themselves and he was serious now, which meant he was deadly.

“The first of many rules of Undercover? A man’s gotta trust the man or men he’s working with. Otherwise he’s got fuck all, pack up, head home.”

“And I’m that man to trust.”

“Giving your skepticism a fair shove, yeah, I’d say you’re a man I could potentially trust, which congratulations: sets you apart from all other applicants.” I didn’t say anything in reply. Didn’t move. Mackey continued the hard sell, his voice gentling with it. “I’m not asking for a yes right now. I am asking you to think about. And then I’ll be asking for a yes.”

“You’re gonna let me think on it?”

“Of course,” and his tone was almost soft. Encouraging. “I’m not that bad a bugger not to give you time your due consideration.” He blinked, slow, reptilian, plotting something in the silent gaps, accounting prematurely for all potential outcomes. I couldn’t think that far ahead; I was still thinking of the past. As if we had never had this conversation once before, the cold nipping at us and when I asked him then if he would give me time to think he all but spat and gave the word _no_. Years back, I was naive. A boy. Of course I had told him yes, and now where was I. About to do the same.

Mackey continued. “I know I’m asking a lot of you, and that’s another thing for you to think on. I don’t ask this lightly. But I am asking you.”

The words unsettled something in me I had thought firmly slotted in place. I gave it no thought beyond that, fearful the whole lot of myself would buckle and collapse. Instead, I nodded. “Right then. I’ll be in touch.” 

“All I’m asking for is three months. And then,” he trailed off. “The future is yours. Cheers.”

 

 

Dublin Castle. Cold Cases. The interview room and the buzzing light, the broken pen, Mackey’s voice a scrape in the back of my mind as I listened to the man before me spin a yarn about his missing mam. A cleaner, gone going on fifteen years now. He had visited each of those missing years I’d been told when I first started. We all knew the story, could recite it as well as her son dutifully did each year. She had rode in the company van out to the parochial school in Clonmel, and then. Nothing. Gone. No trace. That was the phrase her son used each time, no emotion. No whine to his voice. That was gone, too. 

“People, they don’t just disappear like that.” He snapped his fingers. “No trace. They don’t fucking do that.” 

But they do, I wanted to tell him. People were coming and going all the time, every minute of the day. People were coming and going, disappearing, no trace, even from themselves. The weariness was back, wrapping familiar arms around me. I was tired of looking for them all. 

 

 

Three days time. The break room, late afternoon dragging towards evening. I poured myself a weak cup of coffee. When I looked up, Brady had me cornered. Brady’d been in Cold Cases longer than me even though I had a year or two on him in age. He was watching me eagerly.

“Hey, Brady,” I said, a slight questioning lift of an eyebrow as accompaniment. 

“Hey ya, Stephen.” He was all but bouncing on the balls of his feet. Christ. If Brady had sought me out to share the good news he was transferring out to Murder, I’d chew my own arm off. I turned back to my coffee, the pot still in my hand.

“You know Frank Mackey, yeah? Undercover?” I froze. That name, it hung in the air like a mocking threat. It took all I had in me not to slam the coffeepot down on the cooker. I placed it down gently, deliberate. I picked up the nondairy creamer, tasted the same as the chemical snow they used for Christmas decorations. Gripped it like a weapon. Potential weapon. I shouldn’t have been all that surprised: it was well-known in the department that Mackey had done me favors. Those favors done varied depending on the bloke doing the telling, spreading the gossip. Everything from me taking his own brother down to spare him the shame or the professional bollixing (two things that never would’ve once given Frank Mackey pause) to me bending over and letting him do his worst to me. When I had started Vice, the jokes had come fast and easy at my expense: Stephen Moran, Frank Mackey’s pet bum boy. It was just as easy to laugh with them, let them see there’d be no real play off of me. But now, here I was, feeling the same way I had felt all those years ago. Feeling the same, but it was different. This time I was on edge for no other reason than it had been three days now and I had yet to answer and Mackey had yet to ask again. I tried to imagine Mackey putting out feelers for other candidates for his special, secret project, but Brady didn’t fit the picture. So why would he ask after Mackey? Why now? Why—

“Yeah, sure, man. I know him, some.” I studiously stirred my coffee until it was grayish-brown. “What can I do you for?”

Brady sidled up that much closer to me and my sad, sad cuppa. “I was hoping you could put a word in for me. For a friend.” I had exchanged all of two dozen words to this man before today. With friends like these, et cetera, et cetera. “Cold Cases’s got me chained to a desk and I’m bored as all fucking sin.”

I looked at him then. I couldn’t help but eye him in total: cold, assessing, searching for use. “You want Undercover?” I said. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine it, lazy as all hell Brady finding the nerve to convince one other person he was somebody other than himself. Fuck, he couldn’t even convince me. It wasn’t until that moment that it dawned on me. I was already thinking like Frank Mackey. God help my fucking soul.

“Yeah, sure,” I said again. I smiled, my lips pressed together, no teeth. “No promises.”

 

 

My thumb hovered over Mackey’s name. His number.

In the scheme of all things—and when Frank Mackey was dealing, you were well guaranteed a scheme—three months didn’t sound like that much of an ask. My better angels protested in the back of my head, the Hosanna hallelujah warning chorus not to dare underestimate Frank Mackey. But I couldn’t help but think: I could handle three months. 

If I did this—fuck. I couldn’t think any further than that. As if Mackey had erected a wall right there, between the present and the indeterminate future should I press down. Should I call his number and say to him the words he wanted to hear: Yes. I’m in. I couldn’t picture anything past that. I tried harder. I could hear Frank crow in my ear, _You had me sweating there like a teen girl before the big dance; when’s Stevie gonna call?_ , or, no, worse still, that smug, thick, _I knew I’d get my man_ settling around my throat like a pair of sweaty hands. 

It’s tempting to tell it like I’d like to remember it: me, reluctant and wise, all too aware there would be a blood price to pay in the offing. Cautious yet brave, my assent pulled from me just shy against my will. This was the truth of it though: hunger. Raw animal hunger. Something had awakened in me the moment Mackey sat himself across from me, before he even said a word. This is how I remember it: I was game. I had been waiting for my chance to play. 

I pressed  CALL. I said yes.

 

 

 

### 2.

_ My name was Connor Hagan. _

“Say it again.”

“My name’s Connor Hagan.”

Mackey flicked his lighter. “Better, I suppose. At the least you don’t sound like you only learned the name yesterday.”

“I did only learn the name yesterday.”

Mackey grunted and lit up a smoke.

We were sat in Mackey’s flat. He kept the window cracked open, the entire place chilled and drafty as he smoked, one cigarette after the other. His place was about as lived in as a tragic motel room. He had a dead plant wilted next to an unplugged toaster on the kitchen counter. A stack of unopened mail next to the unused phone jack in the wall. His leather jacket draped over an uncomfortable-looking armchair angled towards a decent-sized television. Anyone's granddad could've lived here. I couldn’t tell you how long Mackey had lived here. Could've been anywhere between a week or the entire stretch of time since I saw him last. That wasn’t information he was sharing, and I knew better than to ask. In fact, Mackey was tight-lipped when it came to most things with me, including this very op he had me squirreled away in his bachelor pad drilling for like I had joined the bloody Defence Forces. 

“Your name?” Mackey said.

“Connor Hagan,” I said. No beat missed here; I said his name like even he,  _me_ , was tired of carrying it. 

“Whereabouts you from?”

“North Wall,” I said, that same apathy underpinning it unfamiliar and thick. Mackey nodded, approving enough. 

For all the gaps he’d left me in the pertinent information for this job, Frank had great confidence as a teacher. When we had first started, he had sketched out what he referred to as his rules for working Undercover. The first, and the chiefest, ranked: do your best never to make up anything on the fly. You had to remember it all later, keep the lies collected within you same as the facts you had always known. Ruinous to deviate from a lie—there lay the trap. Liars got caught when they stepped away from their preparation. When they went off book. “And that’s all you’re doing here, kid. You’re lying.” It was more than that, and we both knew it, but there was an appealing clarity to think of this as nothing more than one long executed lie. “Keep it simple,” that was another rule. Liars, I knew, felt an impulse to complicate their story, as if the more detail provided the more verisimilitude earned. So Connor Hagan, like me, would be from North Wall, a nobody come from nothing. 

“We need to cultivate an aura of the mysterious about you, reel them in with that charming, inscrutable mug of yours.” That was another thing Mackey had said, early days. I knew myself to be many things, or I had been many things before I became Connor, but inscrutable was a new one. Most likely a lie. I hoped he was keeping track. 

“You know that one pub, The Chain?” Mackey said to me now. Mackey’s plan, as it were, was revealed to in this fashion, in starts and stops. With every bit of it Mackey gave to me it was like he was testing me, probing me for weakness, assessing his own ability to trust me. I was in a constant state of having to prove myself, to him and to me, and it was wearing.

“What about it?” I said. 

“Consider it your new local. When we got you ready, there’s the bar stool we’re gonna plop you down on.” Mackey stood, began to pace. Lit another smoke. “We keep the backstory simple. You were born restless. It’s the most interesting thing about you. Pa drank, Mam drank, you, bored, drank then left. Tragedy and camp are too noticeable. Memorable. We want you boring. Bored. Apathetic. The only thing you care about is whose cock attached to which man with a billfold earning a spot in the gazillionaire’s club you’ll put in your mouth or arse.” Mackey leaned back, gestured kingly, grandly. “Enter me.”

Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that Mackey was working in the field on this. I had assumed he’d remain up in his tower, his office, headphones on as he listened to me draw my last breath after finding myself on the wrong end of both a lie and a blade, bleeding out in some tragic heavily DNA-contaminated pub loo. 

“Am I understanding you plain?” I asked after a stunned beat. “You’re in the field?” He cocked his head to the side, mouth tipping up, hidden when he raised his cigarette. “You're working Undercover right now?”

“I’m a true multi-tasker, young Connor.” The name sounded horrible and wrong between us. His face flickered like he knew it, too. “You should try it on for size.”

That information alone was enough cause for alarm. For panic. Both were tripped inside of me. But the rest of it, fuck me. 

“And I’m meant to be … ” I didn’t know how to complete the sentence. The second Sullivan Bird’s name had entered the mix, I should’ve expected this much, at the least, but still. Thought he'd at least ask me first, but then, more for the fool for me for ever imagining Frank Mackey would sit me down and talk about anything as personal as who I liked to fuck. No. He'd expect what he wanted from me, nothing more. “… in love with you?” Horror had fucked my words and Mackey smirked around the cigarette between his lips, well-amused. 

“No, babe.” That word was slippery and ugly in his mouth too and I blushed all the same. “You’re meant to want to fuck me.”

I blanched again, worked hard to sidestep that for the time being.

“And what is it I’m trying to get out of these other guys by behaving  like…all of that ?”

Mackey looked at me like he thought I was soft or thick or both. “An invitation. I’ve gone as far as I’m gonna get with these boys on my own. I need something—someone—to vault me over the top. Prove me as interesting.”

“And that’s me, slumped at a bar with my red light on?”

“Something like that.”

My shoulders slumped and I sighed. “This plan is beyond mental.”

Mackey sat down across from me. “Most of the best ones are.”

“Then you need to explain it to me, plain. No more of this riddling nonsense.”

The plan, pulled from Mackey, as it were: I was to stake myself out at my new local where I would encounter Mackey, who had done a commendable enough job infiltrating the higher echelons of Bird’s crew at one of Bird’s tamer clubs. We would meet, we would flirt, publicly. Whatever the fuck that entailed. We would leave together and we would make it appear as if we had gone home together for your usual rough and tumble. It was believed, by Mackey, his behavior would not go unnoticed by Bird’s men who populated The Chain nightly and word would make its way back to Bird. They would invite him, and most like me, his new friend, behind the curtain at Dolus. But to get that one step further, he needed me. “I’ve learned anything,” he said to me now, “it’s our man trusts men like him.”

“Criminals?”

“A touch more imagination than that.” Mackey waited. I waited, too. He was going to make me say it. Mackey’s mouth tipped up. “More specific than that. Not just gay, but men who appreciate similar proclivities.” 

“Such as?”

“Exhibitionism, being the primary. All other manner of sin housed under that tent.” Despite my best efforts, I could feel the color drain from my face.

“Would you look at you. Got the face of an altar boy, just got his first peek under a nun’s habit.” He chuckled to himself. “It won’t come to any action, so relax your bollocks.” He took a long drag off his cigarette, the smoke curling in front of his face. “I’m very flattered, by the way.”

“Fuck off.” Dread had paired up with the anxiety that had been mounting in me ever since I had told Mackey yes. “What’s behind the curtain?” I asked. “That some kind of metaphor?”

“Sure, but also literal. At Dolus, they got a curtain. Leads to the back of the place, invite only. You’ve made plain you’ve heard the rumors, but word is, from his own boys, there’s more than just a fuck club happening back there. Got your garden variety arms trafficking. Drugs. You name it. All manner of sin,” he said again.

I was all but leaping through circles of hell at this point. “Right,” I said under my breath. I raised my head and found him watching me, closely. Something had been bothering me from jump; I felt a fool for not questioning it sooner. “Who’s handling this if you been on the ground?”

Mackey had been waiting for that question. There was preparation in the way he ground out his cigarette, how he clasped his hands between his legs and leaned forward. His face closed off from me, the humor gone. “Let me handle the logistics. You just worry that bright head of yours about Connor Hagan.”

“I thought you didn’t work the field anymore,” I pressed. He had to know I wouldn’t be that easily put off.

If a man knew how to make a shrug look dangerous, it was Mackey. “Every man wants his last ride before he’s put out to pasture, gold watch slung around his neck alongside the albatross.”

I frowned. No way was Mackey anywhere near retirement. That worry and doubt, faint as a lace curtain drifting over a locked window, crept over me again. Nothing here felt above board, and I knew. Mackey was running his own op, the same op he was working in the field. Goddamnit. 

“How hard’s IA gonna fuck you for this?”

Mackey grinned, all teeth. “Does it matter if we get our man?” We—I was dropped in it already, up to my fucking neck in it.

“I’m not losing my badge over this, whatever this is,” I said.

“And no one’s come collecting for it, sunshine. Would you hold your bloody horses.”

“You’ll forgive me if my heart and soul don’t immediately leap to trust when’s comes to you, yeah?”

Frank laughed, delighted and frustrated in equal measure. He leaned back in his chair. Picked up the lighter but did nothing with it.

“How’s about I tell you a story then? Man like me, man in charge, so he thinks, on the ground and in deep, Auld Lang Syne, he’s saying Happy New Year and fuck off to twelve months under. He thinks he knows what he’s seeing and he thinks he knows the things he can keep to his lonesome, and most of the time, god bless, the man is right. But even a right man gets it wrong now and again, stopped clocks and all. The problem being, of course, a man under, in this job, he gets it wrong and the stakes are impossible. No take backs here, young Stephen. But I’m guessing you know that already, look at that pinched mug of yours. No take backs. A man fucks up and stands to bear his consequences. You wanna know what I learned? No end in sight for some consequences. A man eats shite the rest of his goddamn life, yeah? In private, in shame, he climbs out and keeps going, gets off the ground and into the office and he oversees his boys doing the same job he did. He knows what to look for, or so he thinks, but then he starts to see the design. The greater pattern. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s all chaos and criminality and thy will be done, place a quid in the collection plate and pray for mercy if not for order, but a man starts to see it. The ripple effect, yeah? The shite he done all those years ago, it’s still echoing down on the ground. His mistake continues to reap and continues to eat and only one man can undo what’s been done. A man, I say, settles his score. That, I say, are ethics.”

“What’d you do then?” I asked. “Those years ago?”

“No worrying your pretty head about it. I got it in mine and on these shoulders. We take down Bird, and I fix something broken for too fucking long now.”

I never did know how to properly argue with Mackey. You looked at a man like that, certain even in his uncertainty, well-aware he was selling a yarn as long as the coast and even more aware that I would gobble it down. I heard truth in that message though, and maybe that would come to be the mistake I bore a decade’s score down the road. “I believed him,” would be a thing that I confessed—to the judge, the commissioner, a priest. I believed him, so I said yes. I was always going to say yes. Fuck me.

He never did tell me what he did. 

 

 

Mackey had set Connor Hagan up in a tiny nondescript bedsit. Nothing personal in that place, alarmingly like my own flat in that regard. The only thing in common. My emptiness came at a price, namely—expensive taste. Everything at Connor’s was cheap. Thin walls, threadbare carpets, old worn and gashed faux wood floors. The bathroom was in extensive need of decontamination. I hated every inch of it. 

“Is this a punishment? Is that what this is?”

“Cheer up,” Mackey said. He patted the side of my face. I recoiled, I couldn’t help it. There was a dark light in Mackey’s face as he watched me. “We’re gonna have to have a go and fix that, aren’t we?” He said it low, and just as quick, he stepped back from me. He gestured at the flat, arms wide, a man and his kingdom bequeathed. He dropped his arms and took another step back from me. 

“You,” he pointed at me. “You’re meant for squalor. You’re meant to be a hungry little thing. Desperate. Nothing you won’t do, Connor Hagan.” The darkness had spread from his eyes down to his mouth.

The flat wasn’t enough. I had to look the part, too. 

Connor, he told me, would have no business looking like a cop. He wanted me scuzzy. So I let a beard grow in (patchy, admittedly, at first) and swapped out the usual kacks and office wear for old denim and a cheap bomber jacket, hair unkempt. I let the tiredness that had been building in me for years show in my eyes. No smile; I left my mouth mean and bent threatening. I tweaked my walk some, my posture. No more care and a stab at officialdom and presence. Instead, I let my hips lead as I walked, shoulders slumped, but I tried my best to add what could only, embarrassingly, be called swagger. I walked, Frank said with a hearty laugh, like a man fresh fucked and all but ashamed for it. The redheaded man’s curse, I fought futilely to keep a blush from showing. “None of that now,” Mackey said. “Our boy’s never met shame, not the once.” 

It was all that easy though, to slip into a different man same as a different set of clothes: rangy and just that much on the side of sleazy. I wasn’t Stephen Moran anymore, not to the eye. I was Connor Hagan.

“Don’t slip. Not even in private,” Mackey said. “You want these behaviors to be natural. Can’t have you wandering around like Hamlet’s understudy, missing his stage cues.”

My palms were sweaty, even now. Dress rehearsal, I thought dimly. I had never done anything like this before. Reinvented myself into a person who hardly could be mistaken for Stephen Moran. A man spent so much of his life attempting to understand who he was and what he was capable of. What it meant to be him. Undoing that was a different lesson altogether. Each step of the way felt as if every assurance I had ever known was being stolen from me and I was left naked to be found on the streets outside Dublin Castle.

It was me, seeing an ugly truth. This was the man I could’ve become if I had decided not to try. I knew Mackey saw that, too.

We had similar backgrounds, Mackey and I. Strivings, too. We just adapted different. We both imagined the future as a jailbreak, a long run towards freedom, anyone and anything potential sabotage, waiting to trip us up along the way. I kept my head down, worked hard, diligent. No spliffs for me, no bottle, no girl trying spread eagle on for size in my bed. Any one of those could have ruined me. I would not court risk. I would avoid danger. I would be polite and friendly and distant to guarantee my escape if need be. Mackey, I knew, didn’t operate like that. Like me. He met it all head-on. A clash of the titans, then. He took what he had and what he knew and he used it all. I knew the stories about him Undercover. I knew now that only a man like Mackey, who played his fears as another trump card, could succeed in a job like this. 

“You best say your farewells to the family, for the time being.” Mackey had issued the order before I moved into Connor’s flat. “Got yourself a woman, you’ll have to tell her the same, you’re going off her, for the next three months time, at the least.” There was no woman, and he didn't ask me if I had a man. Only family then. I headed out the Sunday before to see my mam, my sisters. Told them I had a real important job coming up that might take me off the grid for some time. A couple months. Was greeted with the grief I’d expected; took it like the man I oft pretended to be.

“And at the holidays. Stephen, really.” 

“It’s a good opportunity, Ma,” I had said. 

She waved at me. “Always you and your opportunities,” she said. “Never heard’ve standing still, not for one minute, have you.”

At Connor’s I saw Mackey out. At the door, he paused. He was careful now, watching me for a reaction. He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets and made me meet his eye. “There will be times,” he started, his voice low, kind if not forbidding, and then he paused. “There will be times you can’t afford to be Stephen and you can’t afford to be Connor. Consider this a final lesson. You’ve got to become no one. You have to disappear, inside yourself. It’s the only way to bear it. You have to go away from it. Remember that.” Mackey stepped out into the grimy hall, and then he turned back. “Pleasant dreams. Enjoy the new gaff.” He winked.

I shut the door. Locked it. What I had thought he meant was that I had to trick myself into believing I was somebody else. Forget my old ways and make room for only the new inside of me. A me that was no longer me. 

I looked over my shoulder at the empty flat. I didn't know what he meant. I had no context for it. Not yet.

 

 

And so it began. 

There was an electricity in the air, static and threatening to spark; I could feel it. As if where I was now, the atmosphere had gone thin and barely breathable. The cause and effect of my own behavior had never felt more vital, more powerful. Each step could give me away. I was the magician worrying the false bottom would betray him. That the locks would hold, there’d be no escape. 

I had never felt more alone. 

The plan was this: I would go in, solo. I’d establish my bona fides. The Chain, a despicable spot. All poorly lit and dirty floors, sticky bar top, cheap pints. Lowlifes clustered in the corners like your garden variety vermin. It was the last place I would ever want to spend my nights. It was Connor Hagan’s new home. The bar was sparsely populated that first night and I skulked my way to a spot where the only thing at my back was the wall. The plan: I’d keep to myself. Drink, or at least maintain the appearance of drinking. “Never lose control,” that was another thing Mackey had said. I would do this three separate times, hoping I'd attract attention. Man looking to get his in the great big city, been home but not his his entire life. Lonely and hungry, those were the two words Mackey kept coming back to, and so I did the same. Connor Hagan was lonely and hungry and he had chosen The Chain to find what was his. 

The fourth time, Mackey would be there. I would leave with him. Frank Mackey would not be his name. He was Declan Murphy now. I’d said the name under my breath a thousand times, pacing the length of Connor’s gaff. Doing the washing up. Brushing my teeth. Declan Murphy. I taught myself his name better than my own. 

The plan: I would return a fifth time, alone, and I would stay there, I would keep coming back, until someone asked me about my man.

“How’d you know anyone’s gonna come asking?” 

Mackey gave me that look again, _this daft fucker_ , might as well’ve said. “Because curiosity is a hell of a temptation to resist. And, because, if they’ve been paying attention like Bird pays them to do, they’ll recognize me. They’ll know that’s worth something.”

I still doubted him, but I would stick to it. His op, his plan. My arse on the line. 

“When they ask," he had said; not if, "make me filthy,” Mackey had instructed. “A fucking tyrant, makes you do the unspeakable.” And then he fucking winked.

 

 

I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Those first couple weeks, all went as Mackey had described. I went ignored for the most part my first outing. Sat there, trying to make my Guinness last. Not even the bartender paid me much mind. The pub was still, the sort of stillness that belied trouble, waiting underneath. Despite my lazy posture, each muscle was primed, ready for action should it come and greet me. 

“No play,” I had told Mackey later that night.

He shrugged. “Early days. You didn’t get yourself stabbed, so I'd say we’re in business, wouldn’t you?”

I could say that the second time was easier, but that’d be a lie, and what’s the point of telling a lie you’re only going to have to account for later? I returned to The Chain two nights later—my time spent in between idle and anxious, nothing to occupy myself with but for the internet and the stash of old pulpy novels I found in the closet left by the last tenant. That second time was different though: this time there were eyes on me. I felt them as I took my place at the bar, as I ordered myself a pint in as few syllables as possible and set myself to the task of simulated drunkenness.

I was done to the dregs when he approached me. Tall, lanky slip of a man, his shoulders the broadest part of him. He had that air to him, skanger done right. Someone had once tried to make him pretty, and this was what he got. “Haven’t seen you ‘round here before.” 

“You been looking out for me, yeah?” I put the snarl in my voice as I said it, tried to make it settle natural in me. Must not have failed because this fella grinned at me. Unlike a great many people I had met in this line of work, his smile was genuine. His face became a friendly landscape with it, someone under other circumstances I wouldn’t have minded knowing over a few pints. Laughing at his dumb jokes, his good heart. I could use that. 

He sat down beside him. “Name’s Duffy,” he said. I all but grinned, too. I knew that name. It was one of the names Mackey had drilled me on a couple weeks back, teaching me these men like a headmaster educating on the prime ministers and fucking U.N. secretaries general. He worked as a runner for Bird.

“Connor,” I said.

“Grand,” he said, and fuck me if he didn’t say it like he meant it. 

I played off of him. He made it easy. As genial and friendly as that face he’d shown me at the start. He was a talker, and I let him. He didn’t seem all that interested in getting to know me, but rather in having an audience. Made my job that much the easier, and that much the harder.

I didn't wear a wire. I’d have to remember everything he said to me. Everything, not just what I thought worthwhile. Mackey would be waiting for me, back at the flat, ready for the debriefing. “We’re operating on the honor code here,” Mackey had said. What he hadn’t said was, _I’m trusting you_. Left me feeling naked as a babe.

“More like working without a net,” I had said, even if the lack of the wire was a relief. From the start, that had been my nightmare: I got caught. They found the wire on me. I was done for.

Mackey had studied me then, looking for something. Weakness most like. “Does that frighten you?” No charm in the question, not the Frank Mackey I had come to know and fear. “I’m sending you into a pub not the fucking front lines. You’ll manage.” That was all I got for a vote of confidence. 

Duffy ordered us shots, whisky. Went down harsh and cheap and I swallowed it easy, let a small breathless laugh escape me. I caught myself up short. Would Connor laugh like that? Only if mocking and bladed, I thought. I put the edge into my voice as I clapped Duffy on the shoulder, said, “A generous fucking bastard you are.”

“To new friends!” he said, face bright red with drink and what, to my eyes, looked to be genuine joy. I took the second shot when he offered me it. 

I was good at this. I played my part. I had always known how to play with and play into people’s expectations of me. Sniveling do-gooder. The Boy Next Door. The fella hungry for skirt. The softie too innocent to imagine a stitch of rot in this world. This role was outside my usual—more sleaze, no desire to be liked—but I fell into it with the same ease. 

The next time was even easier, and the time after that. I had Duffy's attention now, and with that came his mates. Made me rethink myself, what I had thought I had known about myself. I stopped myself there; it wasn’t me they were interested in, but Connor. I best bear that in mind. 

It wasn’t me Mackey had come for—it was Connor.

 

 

No one would ever ask me to do it, but I’d testify to it: when Mackey entered The Chain all of the oxygen went out of the room.

I gave him only the one glance and then I returned to the pint before me. Played the long game of it, big cats circling each other like on the Animal Planet, but perhaps I gave myself too much credit. There was only one predator and I was its prey. 

I kept up my monosyllabic end of the conversation as Duffy kept talking beside me, giving out about everything from his rent to his ex to the program he’d caught on the telly earlier that day. I nodded, listened without hearing a blessed thing. Dread had pooled thick in me, deep and tarry, and I waited for him. He would come to me; that was the plan. If I had learned anything these last weeks it was how much Undercover relied on the arrogance of a plan, how easily most like all that could be torn asunder. 

He finally came to me as I was coming back from the jacks. He met me, the small alcove dark, visible from the bar all the same. Stepped right in front of me and I wiped my face blank, told myself over and over again, _I don't know him_. I don’t know him.

“You come here alone?” For opening lines, it was near comical how weak he played it. I felt my mouth twitch. His eyes darted down, saw it. 

“Is that a top concern of yours?” I had decided, early on, after meeting Duffy, his mates, that Connor Hagan was a right piece of work. He never approached anything straight on but rather came at it coated in slick sarcasm, cynicism and doubt. I didn’t know that life, but like everything else about Connor, it was all too easy to slip into. 

Mackey stepped that much closer to me. “No one’s ever taught you what to do with that smart mouth of yours, have they?” Before I could say anything, he was touching me. His hand cupped my jaw and I ground my teeth together. I met his eye and I watched him, felt it, as he parted my mouth open with the pad of his thumb. Itasted only warm skin. I braced myself to react as Connor and not as Stephen. Stephen, I knew, he’d swallow fast and nervous, his breath coming too fast, eager to please as much as he was eager to want, always. Connor though—he’d show nothing but his eyes gone dark, the slight cant of his head designed to invite more. I pressed the tip of my tongue to the flat of his thumb.

He was close enough I could feel his thigh against my own. I didn’t try to imagine what we looked like to anyone who might be watching. He had wanted people to see; this was all for show. 

That deniability became that much slipperier when Mackey grabbed my arse. His fingers pushed lightly but insistently between my legs. Something a lot like shock uncoiled fast and brilliant hot in me and it was near enough for me to forget myself. Forget Connor. It stunned me how quickly things happened Undercover. Always on the fucking edge. I marshaled my own shock and let it play out as sly interest on my face—or at the least, that was the intended result. A man well-used to the blunt approach, so to speak. I angled my hips towards Mackey and let the old North Wall accent fill my voice when I spoke.

“Who’s you then?” I said.

Nothing showed in the Mackey I thought I knew to demonstrate this was only an act. I was impressed. Everything about him rang genuine. It felt as if two realities had been superimposed over each other and I ran a great risk of getting lost somewhere in the in-between. 

“Your next ride, if you want it.” Low and cocky, he said like he already had seen the future and it was me on my knees and him behind me. Once planted, the image stuck.

The question swelled inside of me, something I had never thought to consider. I had never thought to wonder if Mackey went for men. There were certain avenues even our brains knew better than to wander down. That was self-preservation. That was still the order of the day. 

“That so.” It was the wittiest rejoinder I could manage. It was enough. Mackey was all teeth now in what was meant to be a smile. Instead it looked a threat and I decided then and there the only thing in it for me was to follow his lead. So I did.

 

 

We left The Chain together. If I tried, I could still taste Mackey’s thumb in my mouth.

Mackey lit a cigarette. We began to walk, side-by-side. The streets of Dublin that night were chilly; I jammed my hands down in my pockets. Mackey smoked that cigarette down, as if post-coital and desperate for it. He wasn't talking, not yet, but I could feel his focus, solely on me.

I had had his attention before, for a variety of reasons, from good to bad to fucking fatal. This was different. This was near unendurable. 

“You’re better at this than I thought,” he finally said.

I winced. “Thanks?”

Mackey rolled his eyes. “It’s a compliment, sunshine. Ignore the backhand.”

 

 

 

 

### 3.

_“What's this. You think you’re a regular now?”_

“He's with us.”

My heart all but skipped. I lifted my eyes up to Duffy. He stood over me, seated at the bar in what I had come to think of as my spot. He gave my shoulder a squeeze. He and his mates eyed down the stranger questioning me. I might as well have been approached by the choicest girls in school at my locker. 

I grinned back at the fella, all but asked him, _what’d you think you’re going to do about it?_ , my blood singing. 

I had thought that working Undercover would be the same as submerging underwater. I was wrong. It was nothing like that. There was no smothering solitude, no deafening, crushing emptiness. It was something else altogether. The end of a run, when you couldn’t decide if it was you doing the chase or it was you who had been marked as the hunt. That wild, near jubilant freedom despite the grim reality: there were too many people in this world and too many of them wanted to hurt you. That solid belief, like a prayer: so long as I played my cards right, nothing could hurt me. 

Duffy plopped down beside me, gestured at the barman for another round. “On me,” I said.

“Damn straight,” he said, all joy. It was catching. It had finally happened, just as Mackey had said it would. It was that easy.

Just like that, I was in. I was one of them.

 

 

It went on like that for a time. So much of me and my days became subsumed by a tense boredom. I’d hit The Chain at dusk, shoot the shite with Duffy and his pals, drink more than I meant. Smoke more, too. Tiptoe up to the line of enjoying myself. I was bored, sure, listening to them, but I was scared every inch of me that in my boredom I would let something slip. I was on high alert at all times; it was as fucking exhausting as it was exhilarating. And each day ended the same for me. I’d wander off into the night, where I was headed and to what went implicit and never outright stated.

Mackey met me each night at Connor’s gaff. My gaff. 

I’d tell him everything. Like a demented therapy routine, Dr. Mackey and his deranged patient, Stephen Moran who called himself Connor Hagan. I surprised myself each time, remembered more than I realized. I parroted back each inane, inconsequential thing Duffy and Pig and Arlo and Sammie had said. Mackey recorded these conversations. Each night, seated at the scarred up table that came with the flat, I felt wrong. Topsy turvy. For as much as I had adjusted to walking the world as Connor Hagan, seated across from Mackey, as if in an interview room, would never feel right to me. 

Even if I didn’t know what it was Mackey wanted me to find out, I understood the score now. I was to be his witness. He was trusting me that much.

“This Pig, he got a first name? A surname too, while you're at it?”

“Sean Carrahan,” I said. I had stolen a peak at Pig’s ID the other night, sleight of hand easier than I had anticipated. The things people let you get away with when they thought there was trust. I picked up the bottle and drank. Mackey sat there, sober as a nun.

“Him I’ve heard of,” Mackey said, more to himself than to me. This, too, had become regular for us. I gave him my information, useless as it seemed to me, and I watched him spin it into gold. I resented him for it. Sending me into the lions’ den, knowing full well what they were capable of, their history. Their future, should it come to Mackey. Giving me nothing, letting me stumble in blind. I was long a believer in fairness, which I often conflated with justice. I supposed perhaps this was my first object lesson in the difference.

It was easy cover for Mackey to come by mine each night. We were, after all, fucking. Should anyone ask. Duffy had mentioned Mackey or rather, Declan Murphy, only the once. No real interest there. Feeling me out. I could wait, I told myself. I had to wait.

“You need to tell me what I’m trying to get here.” Mackey had stopped recording. He very slowly and very deliberately placed his phone facedown on the table, folded his hands before him. 

“I don’t need to tell you shite unless the good Lord moves me to do so.” He cut his eyes towards me. “You have to know, I’m doing you a favor here. The less you know the easier this goes for you.”

“Maybe. But I don’t know what it is you want me keeping an eye on. And if I know? I can lead them there, get you what you want. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be trying to get out of these boys.”

“Everything. Anything and everything. You’re a cop. And I know we’ve gone and killed that man for the time being, but surely your powers of observation didn’t make it to the grave.”

I scrubbed a hand over my face. This was exhausting, too. He still spoke to me like I was the new recruit he had plucked up from the gardens of Dublin Castle. Laying in wait for me, ready to pounce and make me his pawn. And he did. He had played me every step of the way; even when I thought I was acting on my own, it all fell into his plan. 

I settled back in my chair in Connor’s lazy sprawl, all limbs, insolent mouth. “You do this months on end, yeah?”

He laughed. Lit another cigarette. “Try years,” he said. Long drag he sucked down. My flat, Connor's flat, had started to stink of stale smoke, thanks to him. “Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

As if I had another choice. No real relief in it though, that I was doing things well enough to continue on as I had. Before he left, Mackey paused. Stood over me. “You're getting comfortable,” he said. “Best keep your eyes open. Connor.”

 

 

There was little comfort to be found in the minor brawl that came not long after that. I couldn’t tell you what we were fighting about. Duffy threw the first punch, and then I threw myself into the fray, defending not just Duffy’s lack of honor, but my own feigned identity. Connor would fight. Connor would be the sort to only know fists for reason. My own knuckles ached with each hit, my own body unused to such abuse. The whisky I poured into my mouth at the bar, after, made my bottom lip sting. I winced. 

“That fella, he come around here sometime for you, what’s that about then?” I blinked in Duffy’s general direction. I'd had too much. I felt hazy and over-warm.

“What you think that’s about? You need a fucking diagram?”

He laughed. We were in the late hours then. The Chain all but abandoned, save for us. Territory fought for and claimed. I was tired more than drunk—punch-drunk, if anything, I told myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d found myself in a fistfight. I didn’t think I wanted to remember. 

“He good to you?”

The question caught me up short, so I laughed too, mean and low. I flipped through the back pages, any and everything Mackey had ever said, mentioned off-hand and mocking, about Sullivan Bird and his tastes. This was the golden ticket in. This was the most interest Duffy had shown in me and what I did with myself and who with. This was the entire reason Mackey had sent me here. 

“If he was,” I finally said, “it’d be fucking wasted on me.” Duffy didn’t laugh this time.

“Some people,” he started. He paused, rubbed at his mouth. “Some fellas might be asking questions.”

“Who?” Duffy didn’t answer. 

Later that night, I was seated across from Mackey. My knuckles were raw, bleeding some. My jaw was sore where I’d taken a pop. 

“Would you look at the state of you,” Mackey said. 

“I’m just doing as you said.”

He didn’t smirk, but his mouth slanted to the side. I decided I would call that amusement instead of anything uglier. “Alright then. Tell me,” he said. So I did. 

 

 

My first time at Dolus and I was taken in through the employees’ entrance. Led to a backroom. A staff room, by the looks of it. Old microwave, dingy paint, a calendar from three years past, a topless woman with empty eyes. A rickety round table we were sat around, an abandoned deck of cards. Empty pint glasses, the stink of spilled ale and something more pungently human. I was delving deeper in each night, tunneling my way towards the heart of something I had failed to prepare myself to meet. I recognized the men seated around the table solely from Mackey. Bird wasn't among them; his top lieutenant, the appropriately named Cutter, was. Dressed immaculately, crisp clean suit, didn’t fit with this backroom, with the men in it. Another way to wear power, I supposed. Duffy sat beside me. He’d gone pale the second we were summoned, back at The Chain. I felt it in my gut, as visceral as any hit I’d taken the other night: I wanted to leave. I shouldn’t be here. 

Cutter’s chair scraped against the floor as he pushed back from the table to stand. “We haven’t met.” Me, he was addressing me.

“Connor Hagan,” I said. I could do this. 

“What you know about your mate Duffy here?”

I shrugged. “We drink,” I said. “Known him maybe a month’s time, who the fuck knows.”

Cutter’s footsteps all but echoed as he began to pace. Every other man in that room was silent, watchful. Eyes trained on either me or Duffy; none looked to Cutter. I recognized it then, what it was that was so wrong in this room. It was violence, coiled tight and waiting, waiting for that terrible moment to break. 

“Our boy Duff tell you what he does for us?” Cutter asked. 

“Nah,” I said. He hadn’t. I knew from Mackey he was a courier. Low man on the totem pole. Getting a little too big for his britches. 

“He tell you he thinks he got a right to steal from us?” Beside me, Duffy had started to squirm. I didn’t look at him. I kept my eye on Cutter. My shirt was sticking to my back. I couldn’t decide if I was grateful or rueful Mackey and I had decided against me wearing a wire. What could he have done anyway? Come busting in here, guns drawn, the O.K. Corral? 

“He's a daft fucker, but he's not that fucking daft,” I said. 

“It’s interesting, is all,” Cutter said. He pulled a gun from the waistband of his trousers. I did nothing but watch him. He did nothing with it but hold it in his hand. That gun changed the entire pitch of the room though. Tense, that much tighter, all of us aware that at any moment this was all going to go to total shite. “He really only starts with the thieving in the last month. Around the same time, I’d say, he met you.”

“You look at me and you see a criminal mastermind?” I said. I was relying on instinct here, my heart beating too hard and too fast. My voice stayed steady but the rest of me was vibrating. “I’m flattered, mate.”

“You keep interesting company,” Cutter said. He never took his eye from me, even as Duffy all but curled into the fetal position beside me. 

“If you call Duffy interesting.”

"I was thinking Declan Murphy.”

Mackey should be so fucking proud. Here he was, his name in the room now. His name about to get me fucking killed. 

“He a criminal mastermind, too? I sure know how to pick ‘em.” My hands were shaking; I kept them hidden beneath the table. 

“What is it you do with him?” The question was too light, too conversational. A man couldn’t kill another while talking that casual. That, I knew, was both irrational and wrong. There wasn’t just tension in this room now, but something worse. Doom, maybe. 

“I suck his cock,” I said. Spat it out. Let my mouth go nasty, hinted at a history of very good use. 

That got a smile out of Cutter. He looked worse with it, all very white teeth in a very straight row. 

You don’t remember horror properly. I know that now. It happens both too fast and too slow, goes scrambled in your head. Your mind can’t process it right, not with all that fear. I’ve probably remembered it wrong. I probably told it to first Frank and then IA wrong. You do what you can to protect yourself. 

Duffy died before he could get out the word, “Please.” Before they let him beg proper. He tried, though, the _pl_ sound a terrible, guttural thing. The crack of the gun, and he was gone. I was gone. Frank was right: I disappeared. I sat there, blinking. My face was wet and warm. I wasn’t here. I refused to be in that room. I sat still and they watched me, the gun still there, in Cutter’s hand, and I knew my fate remained undecided. I kept my face flat, willed my body still and solid. 

I had known going in, you saw a lot of shite in this job. A never-ending hall of grotesque acts people were guilty of committing against each other. Bodies turned into something else, the human element absent, both victim and perpetrator. Despite all that, I had never seen a murder play out in real time. Never watched another person die that sudden and that violent. I needed to leave. 

“What the fuck?” I tried to sound more outraged than terrified. 

I made a crack about how they owed me a new shirt. I couldn’t tell you what I actually said; the words fell out of me, from a place that understood self-preservation far better than the rest of me did. I stood up, my legs solid, and they laughed with me. I hadn't realized I was laughing. Cutter had already put the gun back in his waistband, and just like that, I was excused. 

“Tell your Declan that The Boss’d like to see him around. This Saturday, here.”

I must have said yes.

I stopped in the jacks. Quickly swiped at my face with dry paper towels, the water pressure too low from the tap. I pulled my jacket on over my stained shirt. Tried to remember to breathe. Each action came from me regimented and routine, simple, as if read from a child’s picture book.

I stepped out into the chill night. Pulled out my phone. Did not look back.

_u up? ;)_ I texted Frank. Declan. His own stupid code. Felt all the more nonsensical now.

 _be there in 20_ , came his reply, near immediately.

 

 

I took a cab, back to my place. Connor’s place. Somewhere between Dolus and the stairs leading up to the flat my hands had started to shake again. The keys jangled first between my fingers and then against the lock. 

I got in, got the door open. Frank was already there. Startled me. Anything would’ve startled me in this state. “Fucking—” I stopped. Slammed the door behind me. Flipped the lock. I held my fingers there, against the deadbolt, solid and chilled. Real. Locked. Safe.

“And what’s got you so desperate for my company then?” Frank said. The wry smile fell away from his mouth when I turned to face him. “Oh, Jaysus,” he said. He came closer. He tipped my head back, his grip firm on my chin as he looked up at me. He frowned. His hand on my face felt both too immediate and impossibly distant, unreachable. He opened my jacket, saw more blood. “What’d they do to you?”

“It’s not mine,” I said. I think I said it. 

What happened next is jagged in my mind, even now. I still hadn’t come back to myself, not yet. The faucet was running in that grimy bathroom. Frank washed off my face. He had a hand in my hair and forced my head back to scrub at the dried blood. He made me tell him what happened, so I did. How Duffy had taken me with him to Dolus, the both of us summoned, Duffy either too trusting or too dumb to have seen what was coming next. A bullet. No, I thought. He knew what was coming. He knew there was no escape. No choice. My breathing had evened out and I was tired. I was beyond fucking tired.

“He was robbing them. Skimming off the top,” I said. His fucking death sentence.

“Is he dead?” I didn’t like the calm, measured way Frank asked it. 

“Fuck,” I said. The start of a sob that never came caught in my throat. I dropped my head. Nodded into my hands. 

The horror was quiet, miserable. Guilty, as if I had played a role in his death—his murder, no sense mincing words, not here. Lonely. My blood was still up, adrenaline making me sick but also bitter. I wouldn’t be able to recognize myself, even if I crashed headlong into him. I felt Frank's hand on my shoulder.

“You’re alright,” Frank said. No doubt in it. I was or I would be. Another thing I had no say in. No choice. A dark faith was gripping too tight inside of me. Where was the choice. That was what I wanted to know. Where were the decisions a man got to make. Or was it all, much like Connor Hagan, just an act. Just another thing we did to live with what we got. 

“Frank,” I said, softly. 

“No,” he said, sharp. I looked up at him. Concern was still obvious in Frank’s face, but how much of that was pretend? How much an act only to get me to do whatever it was he wanted me to do next? I was still his pawn. I’d do well not to forget it.

I couldn’t decide which was worse—if I could see him clearly for who he was or if he was a stranger to me. He was waiting for me to correct myself. I wasn’t going to call him Declan. I couldn't. I said nothing.

 

 

 

 

###  **4.**

_“This drink doesn't taste right.”_ **  
**

The escape clause, Frank called it. It was for me, to pull out if things went too far. If a line went crossed. Frank didn’t bother to demarcate what that line might constitute. That was for me to decide. When you worked Undercover—I’d heard the stories. For the man inside, the man sent to ground, a new name, a new life, a new identity, the lines were erased. You built them as you went and prayed they’d all connect. Prayed you could live within those lines even when you were back outside. When you became yourself again. 

I used to think there were lines even Frank wouldn’t cross. Now that I had seen inside—the job, him—I knew there wasn’t a sacred fucking thing Frank wouldn’t dash and destroy.

Dolus. We’d been by, together, a couple times since Duffy’s death. No one breathed a word of it. Of Duffy. It was as if the man had never existed. Unnerved me more than anything. I could hear each and every voice that had ever pleaded with me in the Cold Cases interview room: _“Just like that, they were gone.”_ Just like that. I was one of them now.

The parts of Dolus Frank and I, or Declan and Connor, had been privy to were dull as any other club in Dublin. Too much drink, too much noise, too many people who thought too much of themselves. Not my scene. Not any of it.

In all that time I had yet to meet Sullivan Bird.

“You know him?” I had asked Frank after our first outing at the club. 

He went cagey on me. Shuffling that internal deck of cards he kept so close it lived inside of him. Always dealing and never played. “We’ve met,” he said. You never got used to it, being lied to. I had always known that, but Frank had taught it to me that much more. In sparkling intimate detail. 

 

 

“Let me explain to you what’s going to happen here.” That was what Frank had said.

The night before, he had drilled me on the events that would— _should_ —happen tonight. I had somewhat known of Dolus prior to this operation. By reputation and rumor more so than actual evidenced knowledge. Dolus, I knew, was all but synonymous with “sex club” in Dublin, but the underground side of it, the kinkier parts of it, that was new to me. I had worked Vice for a time, but not this angle of it, and I had never been what anyone could describe as all that publicly sexually adventurous. “You say those like they’re good things,” Frank had said. I had ignored him.

Dolus, the part we were interested in, was invite only, access limited. And after everything that had happened, everything I had done on Frank’s orders, Declan Murphy and Guest had finally received their invitation. 

“We go in,” Frank had said. “Happy as we please, here for the party and the good times. You’re a good boy, you’re quiet. I want you with your eyes open. I want you to remember everything.” He fixed that determined gaze on my face; something moved over, clouded and then left, his own face. “All we're gonna do is watch. No real harm in it. Nothing to make a man like you blush.” I had wanted to hit him. It was a new reaction to me that I wanted to label as Connor’s if only for the visceral violence hungering in me, not Stephen’s, but that was a lie. Everyone lied to themselves—call it self-preservation—but I was turning it into a dramatic art. 

Frank outlined it all for me. He had thought of everything. He sketched contingencies and Plans A through Z and everything and anything the both of us could do to prevent us from finding ourselves on the wrong end of a brandished gun. I could feel the energy thrumming through him—found myself catching it, too. 

“You follow my lead in there,” he said. “Follow me, and we’ll get clear just fine.” He didn’t tell me that everything would be fine. That nothing bad would happen. We both knew that had already happened. We both know the worse was ongoing, right there, inside of me. We knew bad would happen; we had been invited in after all. 

“Follow me, and it’ll be a fucking walk in the park.”

Like I said: you never got used to being lied to. Frank, I learned, not only lied. It was worse than that. He was wrong sometimes.

 

 

Just as Frank had said we would, we were taken behind the curtain upon our arrival. So to speak—it was a locked door instead of a curtain, flanked by security. We were frisked by anonymous men in suits more expensive than Connor’s monthly rent. Fuck, than my own fucking rent. 

The back hall was dark, a pulsing bass thrumming up through our feet as we descended lower into the club. I’d swear I could taste my heart in the back of my throat, pounding right along with the music. A door, painted dark red, waited in front of us. Our armed escort opened it for us. Frank’s fingers brushed my wrist, and he stepped in front of me. And then the both of us were through. 

We entered into a menagerie of depravities set out for our consumption. I didn’t know where to look. There was a pair directly in front of us, a blindfold covering both men's faces. The loud techno music went a long ways to drowning out whatever noises the fucked and the fucking might be making; only made the tableau all the more surreal. 

“Declan Murphy.” Cutter again. His mouth twisted in what I supposed would be called a smile for most people. On him, it looked like just another weapon. 

“Cutter. How you doing, man?” I watched as he and Frank shook hands. 

Cutter nodded towards the room, or perhaps to the pair of men fucking to his left. “Welcome. Your first time, yeah? Go on ahead and take it all in. Your viewing pleasure.” He eyed me then, beside Frank. “Gotta tell you, mate. Didn’t know you went in for ginges, Murphy.”

“Their mouths are hotter.” Droll, uninterested. Frank looked over at me.

No part of him was touching me, but still, that look on his face. Dismissive but heated, contradictory in a way that felt new to me. New, but it had always been there in him. I could all but feel his hands all over me. 

“Come with me,” Cutter said. “Let’s get you a seat. See if the boss is in.”

I followed them. I watched them. I had learned fast, and I had learned through our brief encounters at The Chain, that Frank in character wasn’t all that different from the Frank as I knew him. There was something disconcerting in that. A man who could exist as he was anywhere and anytime. It wasn’t meant to be that easy. A man wasn’t meant to be that malleable.

 

 

I found myself seated alongside Frank, pressed up against him. A glass of something cold sweated in my hand. The heat of Frank was right there, for the taking. Me served similarly up on offer. 

My discomfort must’ve been painfully obvious to him—the only reason I could think for Frank’s sudden placement of his hand on my thigh. I tried to relax myself. Reminded myself that this part of role was supposed to be natural. I was supposed to want this.

It wasn’t like I had harbored some great fear of intimacy, physical or otherwise. I had always thought of myself as fairly well-adjusted in that regard, if not too well-adjusted. I’d never been the sort to go accused of commitment phobia or first date fuck night jitters. I was choosy, but when I wanted something—when I wanted someone—I went for it. This was a wholly different story. 

A wholly different fuck. 

Frank was watching the crowd, so I watched him. That was my role, wasn’t it? His face had become familiar territory for me over the weeks. I saw it every night. My eyes skimmed over the lines indented at the corner of his eye, the proud cut of nose and chin. The memory came to me of his hand on my own face, splattered with Duffy’s blood. No great phobias aside, that had been an intimacy that struck fear in me, dark and consuming. I thought of that now, with his hand on my thigh, dispassionate in its ownership. He hadn’t asked me if I wanted out. He took down my report, and that was that. I saw him the next night. I hadn’t gone anywhere that day, stayed holed up in that squalid flat. Frank hadn't said anything about that either. He sat with me for an hour or so, the two of us silent, not necessarily companionably. He smoked, cigarette after cigarette, and I flicked through the pages of one of those forgotten pulp novels. “You’ll go back, tomorrow,” he said when he stood to leave. I knew what he meant. The Chain, me, returning there to find out just how much Duffy’s mates were gonna hold this against me. “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t look at him. I went back the next night. People disappeared; I knew that now. Pig and Arlo and Sammie paid for rounds and I drank with them and if anyone noticed a man was missing amongst us, no one said a fucking thing.

And now I was here.

Frank’s head turned towards me, abandoning the sexual acrobatics behind him. “I take you out for a good time and what do I get? The cold fish routine?” It was a warning. He was warning me. 

He was testing me.

I took a deep breath. I imagined every knob in my spine going slack and easy. I angled my body towards him; the movement brought his hand that much higher up on my thigh. His fingers scraped against the inseam of my trousers. I removed myself from myself, watchful and cautious—or I tried to. I was removed, but nowhere near enough. It wasn’t just his face but his body that had become familiar to me. That struck me as terrible and wrong. Appealing for precisely both those reasons. I took a long pull from my drink. 

Frank had made a great many presumptions when it came to this op. For one, he had never asked me if I fucked men. He either knew the truth for certain (yes, I had) or the truth was that obvious on me. Or it simply didn’t matter. The job, Frank had said, was to make it appear I wanted to fuck him. It never occurred to me until now to wonder after Frank’s job. He never bothered to illuminate Declan Murphy’s motivations.

Before I had to decide what to do next—with my body, with Frank’s—Sullivan Bird approached. I had expected a bigger man, more imposing. He was built slight, wiry with it, eyes dark as pitch. I could see that, even in the low lighting here. He was a man who walked through the room like he knew he could part the oceans, should it come to that. He was a man unused to being denied.

“Declan Murphy, didn’t think I’d fucking find you here.”

Frank held his hands open before he stood, shook Bird’s hand. “I live for the element of surprise.”

Bird had to look up to meet Frank’s eye, but even with that, it was plain which of these two men had all the power in this room. “I’ll bet you do.” He gestured back towards the sofa—and me. “Sit.” Frank did as he was told. Sat back down beside me, his arm now curved along my back, fingers skimming my shoulder. Bird sat across from us, eyes fixed on me. I appreciated having the bulk of Frank alongside me, shoring me up, I imagined. “And this must be your boy. Connor Hagan.”

Frank looked over at me, bright mockery shining in his eyes. “Say hello, Connor.”

“Hello, Mr. Bird.”

Nothing in his face gave. He just went on looking at me until he wasn’t, his attention shifted back to Frank.

“I heard tell you got quite the prize on your hands here, Murphy.”

There was danger in the feline, lazy blink of Frank’s eyes. It was deliberate. “You’ll have to be more specific, Boss.”

Bird nodded in my direction. “From what I’ve been told, you found yourself a cocksucker well-apt to brag.”

Alarms and red lights might as well have been ringing and flashing in my head. Had I bragged that night to Cutter? Had I, in my terror, dug myself a different grave? I didn’t move, but Frank did. He leaned forward, the heat and the weight of him pressing into my side as he moved. “You jealous, mate?”

Bird laughed at that. Nothing joyous or comforting in the sound. There was a challenge housed in that laugh, a prelude of something worse to come. “A lot of men? They're a lot of talk. I’m sure you know this, Murphy. But a man of action? Now that’s something worth a bit of earned respect. Or jealousy.” He all but winked. 

“Forgive me the cheek, but I’d right call you a man of talk now, yeah?” The charm, the twinkle, was back in Frank’s voice and his eye. “Spit it out then.”

“‘Spit it out,’” he repeated. “This one. Does he spit or does he swallow?”

“Swallows.” Frank dragged the word out, like a fucking prison sentence. 

Bird leaned back, got himself comfortable. “I think I’d like to see that.”

Frank didn’t even blink. “You wanna watch me get my cock sucked?” Wrong tact, I thought. I knew. He had framed it as too much of a challenge. I had only just met him, but I knew this, too: Sullivan Bird wasn’t a man to back down. He wasn’t a man to be shamed.

“Don’t tell me you’re shy.” And there it was. The danger. This was no request; it was jagged and bladed as any other demand, all the way through. Panic spread, white-hot, through me.

“I’m certainly not,” Frank said, and then he looked to me.

_“This drink doesn’t taste right.”_

Frank was looking at me like he expected me to say it. To invoke it. The escape clause. His entire body was primed in a way that only I could recognize: the only thing that had changed about him was the tension as it settled in him. The preparation for fight or flight. He was still sprawled lazy, his mouth still lewd in a way I would never know how to describe or recreate, but it was there. He was ready for whichever path I chose.

I met his eye. I got to my knees. I swear to Jesus Christ Himself, Frank looked proud. 

 

 

If Frank didn’t want this, he was doing a very, very fine job of hiding it. He had the devil’s light in his eyes and his mouth twisted the way it did when he had his fellow cornered in the box. He’d get his man, that was what his face said. He’d get his man, down to his knees. Christ. 

For lack of anything else to do, as I tried to quell the panic trip-wiring through me, I nuzzled my face into the crotch of his trousers. Gave a man time to think. Though thinking might be the last thing I needed right now.

“Let him,” Bird said when Frank’s hands went to his own belt. Fucking hell, was he going to provide color commentary the whole time?

But my hands were steady as they pushed Frank’s out of the way. I got his belt undone, his flies. I was doing this. This was something I was doing and something I knew, down to the heart of me, that I would not come back from, not unchanged. 

Frank’s cock was thick. Big, and of course it was. A man walked around like he was packing a prick large enough to bludgeon half of Dublin with, he had best to back it up. My jaw winced in anticipation. He was half-hard already; I was too afraid to look up at him, so I didn’t. Frank’s body was still, belied by nothing. Nothing but the cock in my hand. He hadn’t to hide anything, I thought, quick, fleeting. No pretend. I had the biological proof, heavy and hot in my hand. A part of him had wanted this.

I licked at him, tentative. Tasted the head of his cock. This is Declan Murphy’s cock, I told myself. Didn’t mean a goddamn thing. I thought about what Frank had said before, about removing yourself from the scene. I couldn’t do that here; I was in too deep. I didn’t think I wanted to do that here. I lowered my head more, licked down the length of him. Frank didn’t react. I did it again, taking him into my mouth, the taste of him now a known quantity—Frank not Declan; there’d be no masquerade here, not for me. He let me. He didn’t move. The idea that Frank could casually receive this from me was suddenly too much for me to bear, humiliating and emptying in kind. I pulled off of him, still now, too. 

“Shy after all, yeah?” I heard Bird say, the mockery cruel and goading. 

Frank ignored him, so I did too. I looked up at him then and his eyes met mine. The brain, I think, doesn’t know what to make of the familiar in new contexts. How you stutter and start when you spy someone you’ve only ever seen at the office or at uni or the pub walking the other streets of your life. They’d found a way to the places of yours they didn’t belong. I felt that, looking at him. He had found himself to the places in me he shouldn’t belong.

There was a softness to his mouth, and I knew what he meant. I didn’t have to do this. 

I balanced a hand on his thigh and I leaned forward again. His hand brushed down my arm, leading to the hand on his thigh. “That’s it,” he said. He gripped himself at the base. He fed me his cock.

This wasn’t the first time for me, a cock in my mouth. Not by a long shot. There were others. I had been younger. Always furtive and desperate, dirty in shame and location alike. Me on my knees, an alley, the jacks at an emptying pub, fear mixed up with desire in a way I had never learned how to untangle. It was still there, especially now. That wild kickback in my gut, same as the recoil from a fired gun. It was so cliche; I had no business being as hard as I already was. 

I was clumsy with him. Wanted to blame the audience. The scrutiny. The fact I didn’t know who I was supposed to be right now. Who this performance was even for. I was breathing hard through my nose. I minded my teeth, felt spit leaking out of my mouth and I swallowed compulsively, earned a shift of Frank’s hips for that. 

It dawned on me that Connor was meant to be a virtuoso cocksucker—his stock in trade, no thanks to me running my fucking mouth. I didn’t look up at Frank again. I took him all the way down to the base, my throat spasming. Frank groaned deep. His hand palmed my shoulder, crept up to the back of my neck. Frank’s. Declan’s. My nose brushed his pubic hair, trimmed, neat. For Olivia, I thought, but, no. Frank had said she’d kicked him to the curb, yet again, so, no. For me. I imagined him coming here, expecting such a thing as this, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to suck harder, prove myself more, or fucking kick his bollocks in.

I chose the former, gagging as I took him too deep again, too fast. In my head, I could hear Frank telling me what to do. You’re hungry, you’re desperate, this is all you’ll ever want. I’m all you’ll ever want. 

“That’s a good boy,” Frank said—the Frank here, in this room, his cock in my mouth—and what the fuck. The words sent something racing down my spine. Made me want to be that much better for him. I wanted to hear Frank say it again. Wanted to fucking earn it.

I groaned myself and Frank’s hips rolled into it.

“Look how good you’re doing.” His voice was low, too quiet to be meant for anyone but me. My eyes flashed open and I finally looked up. He was staring straight down at me. I stared back. “Good,” Frank said again.

This wasn’t anything I wanted. At least I didn’t think it was, but I was doubting myself now, unsure who I was in my own head right now. Stephen or Connor. Connor would want this, hungry for it from jump. But Stephen. I had sat in that art room at St. Kilda’s and Frank had sat there too and maybe this, like that, was just another way to try to tear a man apart. Maybe I had wanted this then but I didn’t know the name, the images to conjure. Didn’t know want could feel like this.

I was slobbering around him now, panting. My throat felt raw, used.

Frank fisted a hand too tight in my hair; my own hips bucked against nothing when he pulled, the sharp pain both clarifying and electric. “ _Yes_ ,” I heard him say, “fucking Christ,” his voice low and gravel-thick. The hand that wasn’t in my hair moved down to my face, his thumb smoothing at the corner of my mouth, my stretched lips, too tender and wrong. My eyes were watering now; he was fucking my throat, too rough, as if something had come unhinged within him, and when I looked up at him again, when I saw him—I saw him. His face flushed, mouth parted wet and open, eyes trained solely on me. It was completely dangerous in its honesty. I watched him come. As promised, I swallowed. 

  

 

All that work, and what did I get for it? A punch in the face, from Bird himself. I was still down on my knees, head spinning from what I—what _we_ —had done. My front teeth snagged my bottom lip bloody. The shock of it, violence coming so close on the heels of arousal, was dizzying. 

“What can I say?” Bird said. “I’ve always liked to see pretty things roughed up a bit. Gives them character, I say.” 

There was a moment, a brief stand-off, where neither Frank nor I reacted. I was still stunned stupid on the floor, but Frank was coiled tight. I watched him. His mouth burst open in a manic laugh, as sudden and out of place as Bird’s own violence. He got to his feet, deliberate and unhurried as he refastened his trousers, his belt. His face was hard beneath that feigned glee.

He patted Bird on the cheek. “You’re a big man, yeah? And you’ve got nothing but my respect. But you touch what’s mine again? We’re gonna have problems, and with that comes more than words and a slap. Are we understood?”

It was Bird who laughed now, hearty and appreciative. As close to approval as you can ask from a man like that. He took Frank aside, and I watched them talk. I wiped at my mouth with the back of my hand.

 

 

We were in Frank’s car, after.

“Are you alright there?” Frank’s voice sounded perfectly the same. A part of me wanted to ask him how he did it. A part of me already knew.

“Yeah,” I heard myself say. “Sure.” What else could I possibly say? I can still taste you in my mouth. I can taste my own blood, too. My jaw aches. I feel sick. I want to do it again, alone. With you. Fucking Christ. Spit and blood were pooling in my mouth and my throat was sore. I cracked the passenger side door open, spat out onto the gleaming wet asphalt. Silence; only the slam of the car door when it shut. Frank still hadn’t turned over the engine. 

“Did you get what you needed?” My voice was very faraway as I asked the question and the city streets blurred outside the rain-dotted window, smudged bright lights and encroaching dark.

Frank had the grace to at least start at the question, clearly confusing my meaning. I wanted to know when I had started thinking of him as Frank. I prayed it wasn’t when I had his cock fucking down my throat. I knew better though. Even before that, an intimacy had gone earned. People did it all the time; I knew that, too. They turned corners they couldn’t come back from. They disappeared.

“Yes,” he finally said. I knew now what Frank sounded like when he wanted to come. “I’d say we got something.”

 

 

 

 

### 5.

_December had settled its cold grip into Dublin_.

The holidays had arrived, too. All the tinsel and jangle came out from hiding and instead of the telly wishing good holidays and Happy Christmas, it was good shopping to you and yours. I was one sleepless night away from an out-and-out _bah humbug._

“I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday,” played on repeat on the other side of the wall. Tinny, cheery. Disgusting. I hauled my pillow over my face, determined to lay there that much longer. 

I wasn’t sleeping much, not anymore. A prickling now lived beneath my skin, left me on edge. I was constantly unsure which I would engage first, fight or flight, always a moment’s beat away from me flying off the handle. Or simply flying off. Disappearing. 

The music in the neighboring flat stopped mid-song. I heaved a sigh of relief, only for it to start again, from the top. I closed my eyes, unable to think of the steps that came after _get out of bed_. Get out of bed. That was a start. I sighed, pulled myself up, and did just that. Avoided my reflection in the mirror as I ran the tap, splashed my face with cold water.

I had always thought of myself as solid. As known, especially by me. There were no surprises tucked away, capabilities or muscles long atrophied or never used. But it was like living in a house all my life only to learn of a secret passage. It led to a cavernous basement beneath, filled with all things new to me. But they were mine. They had always been here below. Waiting.

 

  

“We clear on the plan for Friday, yeah?”

I lifted my chin. I did not meet his gaze. “I keep my mouth shut. We’re clear.”

Frank and I had met each night at the flat for our debriefing sessions in the week stretch since Dolus. Dolus and what had happened there. Look at me: despite everything, and I resorted to innuendo. 

“You keep your mouth shut,” he said to me now. “We go in together, and we let them see we’re game. Nothing fast and nothing eager. Slow, steady.” He didn't say cautious; there was no need. Nothing I’d done since he crashed down at my table at The Passage back in October could ever be categorized as cautious. “Bird’s arranged the meet, and we’re on his territory. We play nice houseguests and we don’t overstay our welcome. And you? You keep your fucking mouth shut. Not a word.”

“Not a word,” I said. 

Frank was very good at his job. Frank behaved like nothing had happened, nothing that would earn him any shame. I wanted to know all the things that would raise that in him. I imagined the list would be very short. Easy to memorize, at least. 

I was a different story. Each time we sat at this table I thought about getting on my knees again. For him. I wanted it, a distracting amount. My leg bounced impatiently under the table. I thought about it all the time now. Memories of it, of him. Of what we had done. Tiny bursts of intimacy (his taste in my mouth, his hand on my shoulder, in my hair, his breathless praise directed at me) would find me, sudden and vicious. Hit me with a low drop in my gut.

I waited for him to leave. Waited even longer after. In case. I’d become that kind of man, who qualified things with those two words: _in case_. One word that’d work for me too was paranoid. 

I went out into the night. My first time leaving the flat all day. I walked. The familiarity of this street, this stretch of neighborhood felt wrong to me. Like I had missed a step. I went to sleep one night and when I woke this became home. I shook my head, walked faster. Tried not to think, not about Connor and not about me and least of all of Frank. I tried to collect myself. I always fancied that phrase. Collect yourself. As if you’d scattered, shredded like confetti and thrown up into the air. 

I ducked into a pub on the corner. Not my fake local. Something else entirely. No one knew me here, Stephen Moran nor Connor Hagan. I had found a way to disappear.

The pub was playing Springsteen’s 2006 Dublin concert over the speakers. As I took a seat at the bar, a sad, tired loneliness took hold of me. I couldn’t decide—was it my own or was it Connor’s or it was the pub’s and I was merely sharing it for the time being. Did anything really belong to me?

 

 

The walls weren’t particularly thick in my gaff. Connor’s gaff. No music this time. Instead, the neighbors were at it again, like a cuckoo-clockwork production of Sid and Nancy, they rotated with seemingly passionate ease from fighting to fucking. Tonight, they were fighting. I found this, of the two options, the more tolerable. “If you can’t see me for who I fucking am, then that’s your fucking problem.” Those were her lines.

I rolled onto my back, stared up. Back when I had still been seeing Liz—a bright barrister-in-training, toiling away at a pub to pay for school and rent and a Dublin life, a girl who was prone to bouts of incurable sadness and unbeatable debates and entirely unearned martyrdom—I had fallen headlong into a similar fight I had thought, until then, I had well-avoided. I didn’t love her, and I did not think she had labored under any delusions that she loved me. We were stop-gap measures in kind, bed-warmers, and that was more than fine by me. It meant the door remained open and daylight, freedom, was always within reach. We had been out one night, dinner and a movie and who the fuck remembers, and at a table behind us a couple argued. Nothing enough to get my professional hackles up, just the usual: an injured party demanding recompense from the one they had made the initial mistake of loving. They both were hurling insult and abuse at each other, and despite myself, I had wondered if they wouldn’t feel better if they just went and hauled off, hit each other. Tasted the blood they were so hungry for from the other. This was my last night with Liz and I was about to swiftly discover this. I said something to the tune of how I couldn’t comprehend the energy for it, fighting like that. I then found myself the victim of a similar assault—undefended. Liz didn’t raise her voice; she kept it flat and cold, and this was somehow worse. “You’re empty,” she had said. “You’re a fucking,” and she flailed to find her word, “facsimile of a person. You’re a fucking pretender.”

Next door, I could hear my neighbor, sarcastic and tired and bullying. “The problem, babe,” he said, “is that I see you. I know what you fucking are.”

 

 

I was unraveling, some. I could recognize that. 

The next night, I went to dinner. Alone. Some shite café near the flat that was mine but wasn’t. The food tasted like something served at an old folks’ care home—edible, resembling a far richer dish once enjoyed in better times. In fact, I thought, taking another bite, this may be a high compliment: the food tasted like one’s probable final meal. The literal last supper. Needed more gravy.

Cutter plopped himself down unceremoniously in front of me. The tentative peace I had found—the café, the bad lighting, the old Top 40 music, the congealed pie—gone, just like that.

I blinked, slow. Collected myself, again. “Cutter.”

“Of all the gin joints and all that shite they say,” he said. He smiled; I wished he hadn’t. 

I pushed my plate away from me. Sat back in my chair, arms crossed. “Slow night?”

He tsked. “And he thinks so little of himself,” he said. “Maybe I been looking for you. Maybe, Connor, you should give some thought to the following: you’re a very easy man to find.”

I didn’t move. I couldn’t decide if it was what he said that unsettled the most or how he said my name. Connor’s name. I'd swear there was more than a little needling, mocking doubt laced through the two syllables of that name. 

“What you doing looking me up for?” Nothing in my voice gave me a way. It was still mine: deep, tired, afraid but unwilling to show for it. 

“You’re a curiosity to me,” he said. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing to be to a man like Cutter. He leaned forward, forearms braced against the edge of the table. “I can’t abide a curiosity.” A bad thing then. 

“My sincerest apologies,” I said, all cheek. 

“How'd you meet Duffy again?”

Somehow, I always knew it would come back to this. Duffy and me and Cutter, Cutter’s men, all around that table, a loaded game of Russian roulette in play I had never given my consent to join. 

I shrugged, worried the gesture was more careful than natural. Neutral. “I was at a pub. The Chain. He came over, we got to talking. Friends have been made for less, yeah?”

“That the same place you met Declan Murphy?”

He was vetting me. I wasn’t dumb. The meet was tomorrow, Bird and Frank and me, and somewhere and somehow, a doubt had been planted in Cutter’s mind when it came to me. I thought of Duffy, felt sorry for him all over again. 

“Yeah,” I said.

“Let me tell you. The only thing I can abide less than a curiosity is a coincidence.”

As I considered my response, a shadow fell over our table. “Hey, Stephen, right?”

I froze. Everything within me ground to a halt. I glanced up at the man. Christ. An ex or a current boyfriend or both of one of my sister’s, his name lost to me in a wave of nauseating panic.

“Nah, mate,” I said. I turned my attention back to my sad dinner and to Cutter seated across from me. Cutter’s eyes shifted from me to my mystery man, back to me again.

“No. I mean, we’ve met, yeah? It's Ryan. I know—” he laughed, nervous and lost. “Stephen, it is you.”

The plate in front of me was smeared with the remnants of a slice of cherry pie, thick artery red. I let all my fear, my anger, all the black things like anguish and doubt that had taken deep root and grown in me in the last two months rise up. All the things since I had met Frank Mackey. I put that all behind my eyes, weaponized it. Looked at Ryan and prayed to god I’d never see him again. Not in this life. Not as Connor Hagan nor as Stephen Moran. “Mate,” I said. “I’d best move along I’s you.” I watched the confusion crash over him. Something like hurt, too. When you started looking for it, you realized how many men walked this earth wearing every sort of emotion on their faces. Right out there, waiting for the taking. Didn’t even know all the ways you could be used against your own self. 

I picked up my cup and raised it to my mouth. “I don’t know a fucking Stephen,” I said.

 

 

That Friday we returned to Dolus. 

We were led to a different room this time, not the backroom I had visited that first time here, but a better, finer room. Like someone had gone and dropped a boardroom into a fucking sex club. 

Frank had clocked the room the second we entered it. Frank was in his element. Glad-handing and irreverent, every inch himself and the man he had created and named Declan Murphy. I did as I was told: I kept quiet. I let him lead. 

It’s all on record now. Both Frank’s and my own account. Bird seated at the head of the table like the boss he believed himself to be. The conversation weaving through innuendo as it approached ever closer to the heart of the matter. Both Frank and I have provided as close to a transcript of that conversation as memory would allow. 

What’s not on the record is what I did next.

It occurred to me, seated there, silent as ordered, that if we got the evidence we needed here, all of this could be over. I had said as much to Frank before, back when Duffy had died. “Murder. We get them on murder, and that’s end of.”

Frank's mouth had twisted, his grin almost fond. “It never fails to astonish me. How you boys, Murder in your eyes, you all think so small.”

I wasn’t thinking small now. If I could lead us to where Frank wanted—guns, drugs, proof of racketeering, mob activity—then all of this would be over. The bad flat and the bad clothes and me, lost in the gaps that had opened wide and hungry all around me—all gone. I could be myself again. I could be safe. 

Bird was winding down a sermon on alliances and the sort of man it takes to seek opportunity, take that straw and weave it to gold, when I said: “That’s all well and good, but are we doing this, or are we not?”

The room went silent. 

It was unlike me—I was patient. I knew how to wait for my open. Instead, I had charged in, reckless. No caution. Entirely unlike myself.

“You got yourself a bold one,” Bird finally said to Frank (to Declan), no humor in it. 

“Oh, this one’s full of all sorts of little secrets and surprises,” Cutter said. Each word was slow and slippery, and I was racing fast towards a final destination that’d offer me no escape. “Who’d that fella think you were, at the café last night? Stephen was it?”

Cutter had left me at the café, after Ryan left. His eyes were cold but his mouth was silent. He had nodded at me, said “We’ll be seeing you,” and I knew: there was no way that was the end of it.

I was right.

Beside me, Frank turned to look at me. His face was tight and empty, eyes cut as if from ice. The trust between us pushed to its limit. Would he leave me here, hung out to dry? Did he know what that would mean for me? Frank hadn’t been in that room with me before. He hadn’t seen how quickly Cutter moved against Duffy, how there was no stopping a trigger finger like that. But he knew, of course he knew. He dragged his attention away from me and turned to address Bird.

“The boy has ambitions,” Frank finally said, drawled low and mean at my expense. “You’ll forgive me if I say it’s the thing I like second best about him.”

He was met with appreciative laughter. Beneath the table, Frank’s hand curled into a fist. White-knuckled, he held it against his thigh, and then he released it. 

 

 

I had fucked up. I could feel the disappointment all but vibrating off of Frank, along with his anger. I knew I was due a bollixing for it, and I waited. Frank made me wait for it. 

The meet ended with us getting nothing for our time. Just the promise of a future conversation. The entire ride back to Connor's flat, Frank was silent. He didn’t say a word. He followed me up the dark stairwell. He waited beside the door as I unlocked it. He slammed it shut behind him when we entered. 

“You didn’t tell me about the fucking café.” Those were the first words out of his mouth. 

“We were prepping for the meet,” I said.

“And you didn't think that Cutter sitting right there with you while you got all but made wasn’t something I might want to fucking know?”

I said nothing. There was no defense. Why hadn’t I told him? “Now he’s quiet,” Frank said, the disgust rich in his voice. I didn't react. I knew why I hadn’t told him. If he had known, there was a chance he would’ve pulled me from this op. Much as I wanted this to end, I didn't want it to end like that. I wanted to be here at the close of it. 

“I want you to answer me something right now,” Frank said. “The one thing I asked of you, the one thing we agreed to, what was that?”

“That I wouldn't say anything.”

“Yes, yes. See, you had me worried for a second there. Had me thinking that maybe the old noggin was finally giving out on me, that I needed to get me a brain scan or some such. Because, see, I had it on good memory and even better authority that you and I? We were sat there, at that table. And you told me you understood when I said you keep your fucking mouth shut.”

“We were understood,” I said. “I just thought—”

“And there’s your first bloody mistake.” He all but spat the words out. I'd seen Mackey a great many ways, the variety truly earned these two months past, but I had never seen him in a rage like this. His temper was volcanic. A molten, crashing wave. Once landed though, it receded just as fast. He composed himself, reined his anger back in. Somehow, that was worse.

“When I tell you to do something, it’s not a recommendation, kid. It’s a fucking order.”

It wasn’t just the op Frank had to control—it was everything. It was me, green, still wet behind the ears as he made me do his dirty bidding as his own family was under investigation. It was more of the same in the halls of St. Kilda’s, the Mackey name under scrutiny and criminal suspicion yet again. I was always going to be something he tried to bend to his will rather than try to protect. Anger flared darkly inside of me.

“If I’m making such a hash of it, if I’m so shite at this, then why me?” 

That steady gaze of Frank’s, more there than I had learned how to read into. “Because I knew I would never find anyone on God’s green earth who looks at me the way you do.”

Something cold and seen juddered through me. Fear, maybe. The fear that came after the wound, flayed open, and now you waited for the salt.

“What are you even on about. How the fuck do I look at you?” My teeth were grit so hard, jaw clenched enough to leave it sore. I felt caught. That I had played a hand I never knew was in the deck. His face was still angry, glowering with it, but there was familiarity there, too. He wasn’t lying to me. History was always going to be seated in the room with the both of us. I knew there was no escaping that, not even here. Not even with new names and the past unaddressed out loud. It was here, heavy and waiting. Wanting.

“You’d like the answer to that wouldn’t you.”

“Yeah, I’d say I think I’m fucking owed it.”

“Are you going to do as I say?”

“What?”

“Take off your belt.”

 

 

“Take out your cock.”

I stared at him. I had followed his first order, my hands stumbling over themselves, dumbstruck, as I took off my belt. 

Frank sat at the table, watching me. Kingly posture, his legs spread; I’d never felt so small. “You see, _Connor_ ,” he said, “you’ve gone and put quite the crack in our trust. Contrary to popular belief, it is reparable. But it does take proof.”

I felt too many steps behind. “And that’s me…showing you my dick?”

“From here on out, you don't say a word unless I invite it. And, Connor. No such invitation has been extended. Take out your cock.”

The challenge was bright in his eyes, the hard line of his mouth. I couldn't tell you what he expected me to do. I had already proven my previously unknown anti-authority streak; maybe he expected more of that. I gave him the opposite. I did as he said. I pushed my trousers down my hips and pulled myself out, cock and balls, over the waistband of my boxers. I breathed quick and fast, felt exposed in both the obvious and the far more intimate ways. My cock was already hardening, interested despite the fucked nature of it all. 

“Spit in your hand,” he said, dispassionate, uninterested, and I did that too, my cock twitching before I even touched myself. 

“I didn’t say you could touch yourself, did I?” I froze, my spit-coated palm all but cupping myself. “Patience, Connor, is the other half of the job. Following orders is the first.” I didn’t move. He said the name Connor with performative ease, like the joke we both knew it to be. That it was Connor in front of him and not me. “I had thought,” and he said this quieter, with actual  sincerity, “you were someone who knew how to be patient.” He lifted his gaze from my crotch to my face; I didn’t look away.

“You can touch yourself now. Slowly.” 

I did. With his eyes on me, my hand felt different. Like it could be someone else’s. Could be his. I didn’t think that was the point of this. 

“Close your eyes, Connor.” I did that, too. I wondered how many people Frank had fucked pretending to be anyone but himself. How many times it was for the job, and in the cosmic scheme of things, didn’t count. I wanted to know if this counted. “I shouldn’t have to tell you this bit, but I will. You don’t come until I tell you to. You understand me?”

“Yes,” I choked out, my eyes squeezed shut. My hand moving slow, from base to tip, squeezing slightly at the head. 

“Good,” he said, and I let out a ragged breath. “Tighten your grip. Connor.”

I did that, too. I obeyed each command. Stopped when he told me to, started when he told me to do that, too. He goaded me. “You can do better than that, Connor. Faster. Harder.” My face flushed furiously and my grip faltered some, my hand slick with precome, unused to critique while in pursuit of _this_. But it was worse when he offered praise—a single word, “ _good_ ”: that was almost enough to make me fear I’d come, right there, on the spot. Easy as anything. Easy as the man he pretended I was supposed to be.

“Open your eyes,” he said suddenly. His voice had gone rough, authority still natural as anything, but he sounded—he sounded like we were back at Dolus. I was back on my knees. 

I opened my eyes. 

“That’s good,” Frank said, and I couldn’t read a blessed thing in that face of his. I wanted to know—I needed to know—who Frank was pretending to be right now. Declan Murphy. Someone I had never met before tonight. Or, and my hand, my entire body trembled at the thought, this was Frank himself. No act. Only him. I pulled at myself, close, so close. I watched as Frank got to his feet and moved towards the door.

“You can come now,” he said, and distantly—the blood rushing in my ears—I heard the front door shut.

 

 

 

 

### 6.

_In an alley, en route to my flat, I was kissing Frank_.

A week had passed in a fog of inaction. It was a drizzling cold night, trying to spit snow. Holidays had come and gone, a new year’s arrival with their departure. A bad omen, I thought, to enter the new year under a false name. After a night of nothing doing at The Chain, Frank had walked alongside me, quiet. No orders barked from him, no comment from the peanut gallery. Had his hands balled up in his coat pockets, as cold as I was.

I had become the sort of man who didn’t know what to do with another man’s silence. With Frank's. If you’re taking notes, you could say this is the point when I, Stephen Moran, not Connor Hagan, lost the fucking plot. 

I didn't even say anything to him. I simply stopped moving. I stood there, stock still in that sleet-slick alley and waited for him to do the same. And he did. He stopped a few paces ahead of me. If he turns back, I told myself. I didn’t complete the thought. If he turns back—

He did, so I kissed him. Closed the distance between us and draped my body over his, pressed him back into the wet brick. Hot open mouth, teeth and tongue seeking something that felt a lot like destruction. He kissed me back, a gasping, unpracticed thing; I had caught him by surprise. He pulled back from me, hit his head against the wall, held me in place by my throat. 

“Connor,” he said. The name jolted right through me. I had no idea who I had thought I was up until this moment. Left me angry, wanting cruelty. Proof of all the things I had yet to bring myself to name.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.

Frank’s eyes had gone dark—knowing, maybe. A soft start to a laugh leaked from him. “Yeah? Make me.”

So I did.

My hand moved as if of its own accord. I gripped the cut of his jaw, solid and firm under my hand, real, and I squeezed until his mouth dropped open. There was not an ounce of fear in his eyes, only anticipation. 

I spat in his mouth. The rough violence of it staggered me; that he’d receive it even more. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, they were that much darker. Predatory. I watched as he licked his tongue in his mouth, swallowed. He was on me then, teeth sinking into my bottom lip as he forced my head down to his. 

Frank kissed me like this was an easier choice than fighting me. Like if he was meant to draw blood, he wanted to taste it, lick it away. Nothing kind between us in that alley, the two of us jostling against each other, wanting to prove something, anything. I could feel him hard against me, hips rolling into each other, both of us giving as good as we got.

“Please,” I said against his mouth. I didn't know what I was asking for.

Frank tipped his head back. His bottom lip snagged against my teeth, and he looked at me. Something flickered across his face—recognition mixed with hunger. He pushed me back from him then. His face was stony now, closed off from me. I couldn’t catch my breath.

“You’re not the first man to lose himself in a job.” I hated him for the gentleness in his voice.

I laughed, the sound harsh in the tight alley. “I’m fine,” I said. I wanted his mouth back on mine. I wanted his weight against me. I wanted him inside me.

“Let’s get you a cuppa. Dry you out.”

“I’m fine,” I said, louder. More insistent. And I was—I had a bit of drink in me, but not near enough to leave me dumber than I already was.

“Let’s go,” he said, and of course—I followed.

He led me to some greasy little café. The lighting made the veins stand out along the back of my hands, the deep bruised circles Frank had earned under his eyes pop. He was tired, too. I could see that now.

“I’m as like to admit fault as I am defeat,” Frank said, apropos of nothing. I listened though, collecting. That was all I ever did with him: observe and report, trying to find that place of weakness. “Which is to say I fucking won’t. But most ops—there always comes a point when an objective party needs to enter. They got to say, it’s time to go.”

“Are you pulling me out?”

He met my eye. “No.” He scrubbed a hand through his short hair. “But someone’s gotta say it: it’s time to go.”

That banked heat I kept cradled in me leapt, all seeking flame. “I’m only playing the part you wrote me,” I spat out.

“Kid,” Frank said, and then he stopped. I had wanted this to be over, hadn’t I? But now, again, I couldn’t imagine a future past this. You’ve ruined my life, I thought, melodramatic and rich, wanting nothing more than to throw that abuse at him and see if it could stick. If anything could.

“The difference between you and me, y’know?” Frank said. He fidgeted with his silverware. Frank didn’t fidget. I lifted my eyes from his hand to his face. “I’ve spent my whole fool life courting a good smack in the face, and sometimes more. You’re only just learning the appeal of it now. Don’t trust that. Please. Be smarter than that. Than me. I’ll take a fill-up, yeah?” he said suddenly, directed at our waitress. 

“That the only difference between us?” I said. 

“The only one that matters to me right now, sure.” He went quiet as the waitress filled his cup. He was watching me the same way he had back in that alley, the same look on his face. Not the hunger, or not only that, but with that heavy knowledge. That he thought he knew me better than me. He lifted his cup. “It won’t be long now,” he said. 

His bottom lip looked raw. He ran a finger over it when he thought I wasn’t looking.

 

 

The op ended unceremoniously three days later. 

Of all things, Frank was made. 

Another meeting at Dolus, this time in the first backroom I had been brought to, so long ago. Should have been the first bad sign. Because the second we sat down it all went sideways in a hurry. 

“Boss doesn't like when things don't add up," Cutter said.  He was the only one in the room with us. Another bad, obvious sign. "So, he digs." He slapped a photograph done onto the table. In it, I could see, was Frank. Younger, much younger, but it was him.

The dangerous gamble Frank had played here had finally boiled over. Bird finally figured out he had been played and he had sent Cutter to do his bidding.  


"You looked different, then.” Cutter said. "Your name was different, too."

The wolfish grin on Frank’s face went slack. He tried to come back from it, but it was too late. I knew all the legends about Frank Mackey. The man he had invented. For a time, I collected the stories. Seated next to him now, I was curious how and if he'd Houdini our way out of this. A glimmer of fear descended over me though. How much of the legend was fiction? How much had he crafted, Dublin police as his mark? The grin flashed back to life, too little too late and trouble this time. Might as well have been painted in unspilled blood. 

It all happened so fast. People said that, a lot, when you got them in the box. When they were guilty. It happened so fast. Like it was an excuse, an immediate pardon. Time had sped up too quick for me to keep up; I couldn't tell you why I did what I did. It was all instinct. These were the things people said when they killed somebody.

It was something I could say now, too.

Just as it happened with Duffy, Cutter moved quick. He had his gun out, aimed at me, faster than I could think of a reasonable defense. 

Frank thought better on his feet. Or maybe he had better instincts. He barreled into Cutter, knocked him and his shot off-balance, the gun out of his hand. It skittered across the floor and I lunged for it. Grabbed it up and immediately aimed it at the two figures grappling on the floor. 

Cutter’s face was bloodied, but he had Frank under him. He had pulled a blade from his boot. He held Frank down and that knife descended to his throat. 

I fired. The shot caught Cutter in the shoulder. He snapped back from Frank. Frank got his knife, but then Cutter staggered, pounced for me. I squeezed off a shot again. I couldn’t hear anything; I tasted bile. I started in fear, felt a hand grab at my shoulder. Frank.

This is all already documented. And I’ve told you before: you don’t remember horror properly. I do remember this though: Frank was rattled. He had a wild look in his eye, a deeper fear than even I knew or felt. It wasn’t the dead man he was afraid of and it wasn’t me with the gun and it wasn’t Sullivan Bird. It wasn’t something more cosmic and greater than the both of us. It was himself. He was afraid of himself. I could see it. I had been there. When you learned something about yourself, something you would never admit aloud, never to another person, something you could only ever admit to yourself when there was a literal knife at your throat, the only thing left to feel was revulsion and terror. 

He was willing not only to kill but to die—for me. 

Frank clapped a hand to the side of my face. His forehead bumped against my own. “You’re alright there then,” he said, out of breath. “You’re alright.”

He had banished that look, fast. If I didn’t know him better, I wouldn’t have noticed anything had disappeared.

 

 

Dublin Castle. Exit interviews. Hours of it. I had been right, those months back: IA had come for us. En route to Dublin Castle, after everything, the stench of cordite still thick on my hands, darkened rust-colored blood still spattered on the both of us, Frank had leaned in close. “You’ve done nothing wrong,” he said. 

“Trust me,” he said.

The dumb part was, I think I did.

“As you remember it.” That was what the IA officer said to me. She was patient with me but unbending. Kept me sat there for hours, answering question after question until everything that had happened felt like a story that belonged to somebody else. In a way, it did.

After, I was told to take a seat in the waiting room. Statements for me to sign. More statements for me to give, most like. I couldn't tell you how much time passed—I was emptied. I'd killed a man. Eventually, Frank took a seat in the plastic chair next to me. Said nothing. It was his turn then, to wait me out.

“I don’t know how you do it,” I finally said. My voice was faraway, as if it had come from the mounted television in the corner of the room rather than my mouth. I was staring straight ahead and I did not look at Frank. I didn’t know how to look at him anymore. “This job. How you’re still here, sitting beside me, the same man. Each time, you came back. I can’t imagine.” I didn’t think I was making sense, but Frank didn’t interrupt me. He didn’t rib me. He was quiet.

“The secret, Stephen?” he said. “In the room, in any room, I’m never not myself.” He grasped a hand on my shoulder and he rose to his feet. “You get some rest then.”

 

 

Four nights later Frank showed up at my flat. “Knock, knock,” he said. 

It was entirely strange and surreal to have Frank Mackey in my actual home. Amongst my own things. Where I lived and slept and ate and breathed and someday thought I’d most like die. 

“You moving in or moving out?” I looked around, saw the place through Frank’s eyes. Clean, neat. Empty.

I shrugged. “My taste outpaces my billfold.”

“Can I get you a drink?” Christ, after all of that, here we were—me, awkwardly offering refreshment. 

“Nah, I’m good.”

“What brings you ‘round here?”

“They got Bird. The op’s closed. IA’s still working through it. Technically, you and I shouldn’t say word one to each other.” He stopped, a rueful grin stretching his face.

“But?” I said.

“But,” he said. He shrugged; it rang false. “Unfinished business, I suppose.”

I could have laughed. He could have meant anything. We had years of unfinished business between us, accumulated and accrued like unsettled debts that gathered interest, unpaid and demanding, a constant threat. 

“And which bit of business’s got you come calling to address?” I said. 

His grin only widened, all teeth. “Why? You have a particular bit in mind?”

I said nothing at first. 

“Back at St. Kilda’s.” I stopped myself. My voice was like a magic trick, divined from outside my body, echoing all the same in this room. “Would you really have killed me.”

He hadn’t expected that. He was tired, but he recovered quick. I watched him approach me. I foolishly thought to myself, you asked for this. 

Frank clasped a hand along the length of my neck. His forehead bumped against mine. An echo of the past, here in the present. He squeezed his hand once and then he released me. “‘course I would’ve,” he said.

He said it sweet, like a vow. I had never known intimacy could feel like this—a man promising to kill you. A man with your life in his hands. A man who could then still touch you like this.  _Go ahead_ , I did not say. Put the knife in me. _Please_ , I wouldn’t say. Finish me. 

I couldn’t say any of that. I couldn’t tell you what I wanted to say to him. It was too hard, putting into words the tumult he had helped build inside of me. 

Frank moved to pull back from me, so it was me who acted. I grabbed his wrist and held fast. He didn’t move, and then he kissed me.

His mouth was surprisingly soft against my own, slow and then searching, as if trying to draw me out. I kissed him back, my own trembling anxiety escalating into something needier. Even then, the kiss between us here was nothing like that alley. Still that game of cat and mouse, the chase, but gentled and near cautious. I knew all the reasons why. Our plausible deniability was gone. If I was lost now, I was lost. If I wanted this, it was me who wanted it. No one to blame but myself. 

And I wanted him, of course I wanted him, but I wanted him to want me more. I kissed him again, harder this time, slotted my mouth over his and felt his weight fall into me. He let the kiss go wide and sloppy, licked at my mouth. The gesture was possessive and breathtaking. I had already let him take, given him what I had. But I knew: he’d dig for more. And he would find more within me, give name to everything that lived inside of me and I was too afraid to fully own.

“Stephen?” he said, low, his mouth still against mine and there was a question. My name, a question. Insanely, I thought of a seance, Frank and every man he had ever pretended to be seated in a circle. They asked my name again and again. _Stephen, are you with us?_ That was what they would say. But, no, I was wrong. Again, I had it wrong. It was one man, seated alone. It was Frank. 

I gripped the back of his neck. Pulled him back in. “Frank,” I said. An affirmation then. “Frank,” and our mouths met again.

 

 

I took him to bed. 

Frank’s body was solid and heavy over mine. The both of us naked, clothes shed in a teenaged hurry. On my bed, together, just as fast. Had everything between us always been leading us here? My bed in my flat, my body caught under his. I thought of the empty nights I spent as Connor Hagan. This was it, I knew, what I had wanted and refused to name.

Frank had both of our cocks in his grip, too loose to give me what I needed. We rutted against each other, directionless. Shivering hot breath stuck in my throat; made me want to beg, so I did. Nothing left to hide, not from him.

“Fuck me,” I said. His hand stuttered over me, wet with the both of us. I said it again: “Fuck me.” I meant it.

“Yeah?” he said. The hot, dark cast to Frank’s eyes made me gasp, bite at his mouth.

“Christ, yes.” I shifted my hips into him, wanted it more than I could tell him.

He dipped his head. His teeth grazed down the center line of my chest. His mouth settled low below my hip, his hand clutched around my thigh. “You’re so good to me,” the words all smudged into a groan, my skin.

He spread me open to him. A wild, caught out noise stuck in my throat as I felt his mouth, his tongue, on me. I grabbed at his hair as his open mouth moved higher, licking, sucking at my balls as the tip of his thumb pushed into me. I’d give him anything; he had to know that much about me now.

Even then, Frank was careful with me, blunt fingers stretching me open for him. I wanted that care to feel wrong, but in that room—my room—and in my bed, I lacked the imagination to change who we had become to each other. 

He climbed over me, settled between my legs. My body, my legs; my bed and my sheets, in my home. If I had learned anything I had learned this: the things that are ours and the things that we think we are mean more than any words I know could say. You can’t let them disappear. You can’t let yourself disappear. 

My breath went shallow as he began to enter me. It had been a long time since I’d done this. I had forgotten what it could feel like, the richness of detail as you’re wont to forget most things. I couldn't tell you the last time I was with someone like this, someone who knew me as he did. Maybe never. 

His hips jerked. I had him inside of me. It was too much, too quickly. Too full. I hissed. “You’re alright,” Frank slurred. His hand moved to my cock, softened as he had fucked into me. Didn’t take much to bring me back, have me squirming and needy. Ready. “That’s it, Stephen,” he said, and his hand left me to grab at my hips, to fuck me.

He was rough with me, punishing. Perfect. It hurt. It fucking hurt and I knew down to the base of myself that I would ache from this, ache for this, for the rest of my sorry life. Frank fucked like he did anything else—ceaselessly demanding, certain he would get what he wanted. I wanted it, too. His hands scrambled too tight against my thighs as he held me open, my hips then, where his fingers curled and dug in hard enough to mark and sting. My whole body heaved with him, my breath locked and trapped in the center of my chest—the same place I kept too many other vital secret things. This would go there, too; I knew it, even as it was happening. 

He kept saying my name: “ _Stephen._ ” Left me hot all over, so I said, “Please,” again and again. My voice shook as I fisted my cock.

“I see you,” Frank murmured. His hand covered mine, moved with it, and I shuddered. “I got you.”

 

 

 

 

### 7.

_“Stephen, come on in. Go on, shut the door.”_

“Hey, Frank.”

“How you been keeping? You look sharp.” 

I rubbed a hand over my clean-shaven jaw; other than that, I didn't react. I knew him now and I knew this for what it was: a performance. For whose benefit, I couldn’t tell you. The benevolent mentor handing over the keys to the kingdom to the young one he had taught his best tricks. For all I knew, IA was listening in, closed as their investigation was. I wanted to pretend there was no trust in this room, not with the two of us in it, but that was just another attempt at performance, too.

I hadn’t seen much of Frank. Not with IA, not with Bird's arrest, and not since that night. I woke alone, but not surprised. Everything about that night played like a deranged fever dream, though less the sex than everything else. The intimacy of it, his body arranged alongside mine in my bed in my flat. Maybe I had wanted to make him mine, too.

The middle of the night, I woke to find Frank already awake, his eyes gleaming in the dark. Watchful even then. We fucked again, lazy this time, unhurried yet somehow still impatient with each other. We didn’t talk; it would’ve been redundant.

After, as I had laid there beside him, I let myself begin to play a dangerous game. I imagined for myself a future I knew I would not have. I imagined this, imagined him, over-warm as a banked furnace, beside me each night.

I woke to a gray morning and he was gone. Like I said—I had expected as much.

Now, his office. Me in a new suit and Frank seated behind his desk. He was handing me off to Murder.

Frank fixed his gaze on me, held me still. “You did good,” he said.

“I did what you asked,” I said. I knew him now. He wanted to say more to me but he wasn’t going to. You did more than that, he didn’t say, and I couldn’t decide if I was glad for that or not. Even with the time off, the time spent bumbling around my gaff, reorienting myself to the life I had absented myself from in the name of Connor Hagan, I was tired. After everything, we still did not know how to speak plain to each other. No agendas. No hidden depths. Not here, not yet.

I would never work Undercover again. I knew that. I also knew that I had taught Frank that he could get lost, too. I had shown him. I compromised him. And for that, I had to go. 

Frank rose to his feet. “I’ll see you around then,” he said. He held out his hand for me to shake. I took it. Nothing seismic happened, and why would it? I knew his touch already. He was familiar and known to me. “You’re O’Kelly’s problem now.”

I met his eye. He hadn’t let go of my hand, his grip iron-tight and hot. “Stephen,” he said. 

I nodded. “Frank.”

He squeezed my hand, and then he let me go. 

Before, I lied. In the middle of the night, in my bed, Frank’s body against my own, he had said to me: “I chose you because you know me.” He offered it like a concession, a battle lost, so I offered him my body. And he took it. He took everything.

I was stranded with the empty victory of it all as I left his office. I took the stairs rather than the lift. Warbling unsteady light here, my steps echoed as I climbed. What had I wanted?

I’ll tell it like I remember it then: I had wanted Frank to betray me. I wanted him to go back on our deal. I wanted him to give me one good reason. No Murder, Frank would’ve said. You stay here, with me. He would keep me for himself. Christ, i wanted that. Hungrily, shamefully, I wanted it, which was how I knew I would not have it. I’d get what I wanted, yeah? What I had thought I wanted. Everyone goes home happy. Everyone goes home. 

I walked into the squad room. Murder, at long last. Conway was there. She nodded towards me as I approached the gaffer’s office. This is what I wanted, I told myself. This is who I am. This is what I get. 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
